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NOTES ON NOVELISTS 
WITH SOME OTHER NOTES 



By HENRY JAMES 



A SMALL BOY AND OTHERS 
NOTES OF A SON AND BROTHER 

NOTES ON NOVELISTS 
WITH SOME OTHER NOTES 



NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

WITH SOME OTHER NOTES 



BY 

HENRY JAMES 



NEW YORK 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

1914 






Copyright, 1914, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published October, 1914 




OCT 16 1914 

>CI.A380895 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Robert Louis Stevenson i 

Emile Zola 26 

Gustave Flaubert 65 

Honore de Balzac, 1902 109 

Honore de Balzac, 1913 143 

George Sand, 1897 160 

George Sand, 1899 187 

George Sand, 1914 214 

Gabriele D'Annunzio, 1902 245 

Matilde Serao 294 

The New Novel, 1914 314 

Dumas the Younger, 1895 362 

The Novel in "The Ring and the Book," 1912 . 385 

An American Art-Scholar : Charles Eliot Nor- 
ton, 1908 412 

V 



vi CONTENTS 

PAGE 

London Notes, January 1897 424 

London Notes, June 1897 428 

London Notes, July 1897 436 

London Notes, August 1897 446 



NOTES ON NOVELISTS 
WITH SOME OTHER NOTES 



NOTES ON NOVELISTS 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 

It was the happy fortune of Robert Louis Stevenson to 
have created beyond any man of his craft in our day a 
body of readers inspired with the feelings that we for 
the most part place at the service only of those for 
whom our affection is personal. There was no one 
who knew the man, one may safely assert, who was 
not also devoted to the writer — conforming in this re- 
spect to a general law (if law it be) that shows us many 
exceptions; but, naturally and not inconveniently, it 
had to remain far from true that all devotees of the 
writer were able to approach the man. The case was 
nevertheless that the man somehow approached them, 
and that to read him — certainly to read him with the 
full sense of his charm — came to mean for many per- 
sons much the same as to "meet" him. It was as if 
he wrote himself outright and altogether, rose straight 
to the surface of his prose, and still more of his hap- 
piest verse; so that these things gave out, besides what- 
ever else, his look and motions and voice, showed his 
life and manners, all that there was of him, his "tre- 
mendous secrets" not excepted. We grew in short to 
possess him entire, and the example is the more curi- 
ous and beautiful as he neither made a business of 
"confession" nor cultivated most those forms through 
which the ego shines. His great successes were sup- 

i 



2 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

posititious histories of persons quite different from him- 
self, and the objective, as we have learned to call it, 
was the ideal to which he oftenest sacrificed. 

The effect of it all none the less was such that his 
Correspondence has only seemed to administer de- 
lightfully a further push to a door already half open 
and through which we enter with an extraordinary 
failure of any sense of intrusion. We feel indeed that 
we are living with him, but what is that but what we 
were doing before ? Through his Correspondence cer- 
tainly the ego does, magnificently, shine — which is 
much the best thing that in any correspondence it can 
ever do. But even the "Vailima Letters," published 
by Mr. Sidney Colvin in 1895, had already both es- 
tablished that and allayed our diffidence. "It came 
over me the other day suddenly that this diary of mine 
to you would make good pickings after I am dead, and 
a man could make some kind of book out of it without 
much trouble. So, for God's sake, don't lose them." 

Being on these terms with our author, and feeling as 
if we had always been, we profit by freedoms that seem 
but the consecration of intimacy. Not only have we 
no sense of intrusion, but we are so prepared to pene- 
trate further that when we come to limits we quite 
feel as if the story were mutilated and the copy not 
complete. There it is precisely that we seize the 
secret of our tie. Of course it was personal, for how 
did it operate in any connection whatever but to make 
us live with him ? We had lived with him in "Treasure 
Island," in "Kidnapped" and in "Catriona," just as 
we do, by the light of these posthumous volumes, in 
the South Seas and at Vailima; and our present con- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 3 

fidence comes from the fact of a particularly charming 
continuity. It is not that his novels were "subjec- 
tive," but that his life was romantic, and in the very 
same degree in which his own conception, his own pres- 
entation, of that element touches and thrills. If we 
want to know even more it is because we are always 
and everywhere in the story. 

To this absorbing extension of the story then the 
two volumes of Letters 1 now published by Mr. Sidney 
Colvin beautifully contribute. The shelf of our li- 
brary that contains our best letter-writers is consider- 
ably furnished, but not overcrowded, and its glory is 
not too great to keep Stevenson from finding there a 
place with the very first. He will not figure among 
the writers — those apt in this line to enjoy precedence 
— to whom only small things happen and who beguile 
us by making the most of them; he belongs to the class 
who have both matter and manner, substance and 
spirit, whom life carries swiftly before it and who 
signal and communicate, not to say gesticulate, as 
they go. He lived to the topmost pulse, and the last 
thing that could happen was that he should find him- 
self on any occasion with nothing to report. Of all 
that he may have uttered on certain occasions we are 
inevitably not here possessed — a fact that, as I have 
hinted above, affects us, perversely, as an inexcusable 
gap in the story; but he never fails of the thing that 
we most love letters for, the full expression of the mo- 
ment and the mood, the actual good or bad or mid- 
dling, the thing in his head, his heart or his house. 

V'The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends. 
Selected and Edited, with Notes and Introduction, by Sidney Colvin," 
1899. 



4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Mr. Colvin has given us an admirable "Introduction" 
— a characterisation of his friend so founded at once on 
knowledge and on judgment that the whole sense of 
the man strikes us as extracted in it. He has eluci- 
dated each group or period with notes that leave noth- 
ing to be desired; and nothing remains that I can 
think of to thank him for unless the intimation that we 
may yet look for another volume — which, however 
much more free it might make us of the author's mys- 
tery, we should accept, I repeat, with the same absence 
of scruple. Nothing more belongs to our day than 
this question of the inviolable, of the rights of privacy 
and the justice of our claim to aid from editors and 
other retailers in getting behind certain eminent or 
defiant appearances; and the general knot so presented 
is indeed a hard one to untie. Yet we may take it for 
a matter regarding which such publications as Mr. 
Colvin's have much to suggest. 

There is no absolute privacy — save of course when 
the exposed subject may have wished or endeavoured 
positively to constitute it; and things too sacred are 
often only things that are not perhaps at all otherwise 
superlative. One may hold both that people — that 
artists perhaps in particular — are well advised to cover 
their tracks, and yet that our having gone behind, or 
merely stayed before, in a particular case, may be a 
minor question compared with our having picked up a 
value. Personal records of the type before us can at 
any rate obviously be but the reverse of a deterrent to 
the urged inquirer. They are too happy an instance — 
they positively make for the risked indiscretion. 
Stevenson never covered his tracks, and the tracks 
prove perhaps to be what most attaches us. We fol- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 5 

low them here, from year to year and from stage to 
stage, with the same charmed sense with which he has 
made us follow some hunted hero in the heather. 
Life and fate and an early catastrophe were ever at his 
heels, and when he at last falls fighting, sinks down in 
the very act of valour, the "happy ending," as he calls 
it for some of his correspondents, is, though precipi- 
tated and not conventional, essentially given us. 

His descent and his origin all contribute to the pic- 
ture, which it seems to me could scarce — since we speak 
of "endings" — have had a better beginning had he 
himself prearranged it. Without prearrangements in- 
deed it was such a cluster of terms as could never be 
wasted on him, one of those innumerable matters of 
"effect," Scotch and other, that helped to fill his 
romantic consciousness. Edinburgh, in the first place, 
the "romantic town," was as much his "own" as it 
ever was the great precursor's whom, in "Weir of 
Hermiston" as well as elsewhere, he presses so hard; 
and this even in spite of continual absence — in virtue 
of a constant imaginative reference and an intense in- 
tellectual possession. The immediate background 
formed by the profession of his family — the charge of 
the public lights on northern coasts — was a setting that 
he could not have seen his way to better; while no less 
happy a condition was met by his being all lonely in 
his father's house — the more that the father, admirably 
commemorated by the son and after his fashion as 
strongly marked, was antique and strenuous, and that 
the son, a genius to be and of frail constitution, was (in 
the words of the charming anecdote of an Edinburgh 
lady retailed in one of these volumes), if not exactly 
what could be called bonny, "pale, penetrating and in- 



6 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

teresting." The poet in him had from the first to be 
pacified — temporarily, that is, and from hand to mouth, 
as is the manner for poets; so that with friction and 
tension playing their part, with the filial relation quite 
classically troubled, with breaks of tradition and lapses 
from faith, with restless excursions and sombre returns, 
with the love of life at large mixed in his heart with 
every sort of local piety and passion and the unjusti- 
fied artist fermenting on top of all in the recusant 
engineer, he was as well started as possible toward the 
character he was to keep. 

All this obviously, however, was the sort of thing 
that the story the most generally approved would have 
had at heart to represent as the mere wild oats of a 
slightly uncanny cleverness — as the life handsomely 
reconciled in time to the common course and crowned, 
after a fling or two of amusement, with young wedded 
love and civic responsibility. The actual story, alas, 
was to transcend the conventional one, for it happened 
to be a case of a hero of too long a wind and too well 
turned out for his part. Everything was right for the 
discipline of Alan Fairford but that the youth was 
after all a phoenix. As soon as it became a case of 
justifying himself for straying — as in the enchanting 
"Inland Voyage" and the "Travels with a Donkey" 
— how was he to escape doing so with supreme felicity ? 
The fascination in him from the first is the mixture, 
and the extraordinary charm of his letters is that they 
are always showing this. It is the proportions more- 
over that are so admirable — the quantity of each dif- 
ferent thing that he fitted to each other one and to 
the whole. The free life would have been all his 
dream if so large a part of it had not been that love of 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 7 

letters, of expression and form, which is but another 
name for the life of service. Almost the last word 
about him, by the same law, would be that he had at 
any rate consummately written, were it not that he 
seems still better characterised by his having at any 
rate supremely lived. 

Perpetually and exquisitely amusing as he was, his 
ambiguities and compatibilities yielded, for all the wear 
and tear of them, endless "fun" even to himself; and 
no one knew so well with what linked diversities he 
was saddled or, to put it the other way, how many 
horses he had to drive at once. It took his own de- 
lightful talk to show how more than absurd it might 
be, and, if convenient, how very obscurely so, that such 
an incurable rover should have been complicated both 
with such an incurable scribbler and such an incurable 
invalid, and that a man should find himself such an 
anomaly as a drenched yatchsman haunted with 
"style," a shameless Bohemian haunted with duty, 
and a victim at once of the personal hunger and in- 
stinct for adventure and of the critical, constructive, 
sedentary view of it. He had everything all round — 
adventure most of all; to feel which we have only to 
turn from the beautiful flush of it in his text to the scarce 
less beautiful vision of the great hilltop in Pacific seas 
to which he was borne after death by islanders and 
chiefs. Fate, as if to distinguish him as handsomely as 
possible, seemed to be ever treating him to some chance 
for an act or a course that had almost nothing in its 
favour but its inordinate difficulty. If the difficulty 
was in these cases not all the beauty for him it at least 
never prevented his finding in it — or our finding, at 
any rate, as observers — so much beauty as comes from 



8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

a great risk accepted either for an idea or for simple 
joy. The joy of risks, the more personal the better, 
was never far from him, any more than the excitement 
of ideas. The most important step in his life was a 
signal instance of this, as we may discern in the light 
of "The Amateur Emigrant" and "Across the Plains," 
the report of the conditions in which he fared from 
England to California to be married. Here as always 
the great note is the heroic mixture — the thing he saw> 
morally as well as imaginatively; action and perform- 
ance at any cost, and the cost made immense by want 
of health and want of money, illness and anxiety of the 
extremest kind, and by unsparing sensibilities and per- 
ceptions. He had been launched in the world for a 
fighter with the organism say of a "composer," though 
also it must be added with a beautiful saving sanity. 

It is doubtless after his settlement in Samoa that his 
letters have most to give, but there are things they 
throw off from the first that strike the note above all 
characteristic, show his imagination always at play, for 
drollery or philosophy, with his circumstances. The 
difficulty in writing of him under the personal impres- 
sion is to suggest enough how directly his being the 
genius that he was kept counting in it. In 1879 he 
writes from Monterey to Mr. Edmund Gosse, in refer- 
ence to certain grave symptoms of illness: "I may be 
wrong, but ... I believe I must go. . . . But death 
is no bad friend; a few aches and gasps, and we are 
done; like the truant child, I am beginning to grow 
weary and timid in this big, jostling city, and could run 
to my nurse, even although she should have to whip me 
before putting me to bed." This charming renuncia- 
tion expresses itself at the very time his talent was 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 9 

growing finer; he was so fond of the sense of youth and 
the idea of play that he saw whatever happened to him 
in images and figures, in the terms almost of the sports 
of childhood. "Are you coming over again to see me 
some day soon ? I keep returning, and now hand over 
fist, from the realms of Hades. I saw that gentleman 
between the eyes, and fear him less after each visit. 
Onlv Charon and his rough boatmanship I somewhat 
fear." 

The fear remained with him, sometimes greater, 
sometimes less, during the first years after his mar- 
riage, those spent abroad and in England in health re- 
sorts, and it marks constantly, as one may say, one 
end of the range of his humour — the humour always 
busy at the other end with the impatience of timidities 
and precautions and the vision and invention of es- 
sentially open-air situations. It was the possibility of 
the open-air situation that at last appealed to him as 
the cast worth staking all for — on which, as usual in 
his admirable rashnesses, he was extraordinarily justi- 
fied. "No man but myself knew all my bitterness in 
those days. Remember that, the next time you think 
I regret my exile. . . . Remember the pallid brute 
that lived in Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit." 

He found after an extraordinarily adventurous quest 
the treasure island, the climatic paradise that met, that 
enhanced his possibilities; and with this discovery was 
ushered in his completely full and rich period, the time 
in which — as the wondrous whimsicality and spon- 
taneity of his correspondence testify — his genius and 
his character most overflowed. He had done as well 
for himself in his appropriation of Samoa as if he had 



io NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

done it for the hero of a novel, only with the complica- 
tions and braveries actual and palpable. "I have no 
more hope in anything" — and this in the midst of mag- 
nificent production — "than a dead frog; I go into 
everything with a composed despair, and don't mind — 
just as I always go to sea with the conviction I am to be 
drowned, and like it before all other pleasures. " He 
could go to sea as often as he liked and not be spared 
such hours as one of these pages vividly evokes — those 
of the joy of fictive composition in an otherwise pros- 
trating storm, amid the crash of the elements and with 
his grasp of his subject but too needfully sacrificed, it 
might have appeared, to his clutch of seat and ink- 
stand. "If only I could secure a violent death, what a 
fine success ! I wish to die in my boots; no more Land 
of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, 
to be thrown from a horse — aye, to be hanged rather 
than pass again through that slow dissolution." 

He speaks in one of the " Vailima Letters," Mr. Col- 
vin's publication of 1895, to which it is an office of 
these volumes promptly to make us return, of one of 
his fictions as a "long tough yarn with some pictures 
of the manners of to-day in the greater world — not the 
shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but 
the world where men still live a man's life." That is 
distinct, and in the same letter he throws off a sum- 
mary of all that in his final phase satisfied and bribed 
him which is as significant as it is racy. His corre- 
spondent, as was inevitable now and then for his friends 
at home, appears to have indulged in one of those 
harmless pointings of the moral — as to the distant 
dangers he would court — by which we all were more or 
less moved to relieve ourselves of the depressed con- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON n 

sciousness that he could do beautifully without us and 
that our collective tameness was far (which indeed was 
distinctly the case) from forming his proper element. 
There is no romantic life for which something amiable 
has not to be sweepingly sacrificed, and of us in our 
inevitable category the sweep practically was clean. 

Your letter had the most wonderful "I told you so" I ever heard 
in the course of my life. Why, you madman, I wouldn't change 
my present installation for any post, dignity, honour, or advantage 
conceivable to me. It fills the bill; I have the loveliest time. 
And as for wars and rumours of wars, you surely know enough of 
me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than 
decrepit peace in Middlesex. I do not quite like politics. I am too 
aristocratic, I fear, for that. God knows I don't care who I chum 
with; perhaps like sailors best; but to go round and sue and sneak 
to keep a crowd together — never. 

His categories satisfied him; he had got hold of "the 
world where men still live a man's life" — which was 
not, as we have just seen, that of "cities, clubs and 
colleges. " He was supremely suited in short at last — ■ 
at the cost, it was to be said, of simplifications of view 
that, intellectually, he failed quite exactly (it was one 
of his few limitations) to measure; but in a way that 
ministered to his rare capacity for growth and placed 
in supreme relief his affinity with the universal romantic. 
It was not that anything could ever be for him plain 
sailing, but that he had been able at forty to turn his 
life into the fairytale of achieving, in a climate that he 
somewhere describes as "an expurgated heaven," such 
a happy physical consciousness as he had never known. 
This enlarged in every way his career, opening the 
door still wider to that real puss-in-the-corner game of 
opposites by which we have critically the interest of 
seeing him perpetually agitated. Let me repeat that 



12 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

these new volumes, from the date of his definite ex- 
patriation, direct us for the details of the picture con- 
stantly to the "Vailima Letters ;" with as constant an 
effect of our thanking our fortune — to say nothing of 
his own — that he should have had in these years a 
correspondent and a confidant who so beautifully drew 
him out. If he possessed in Mr. Sidney Colvin his 
literary charge d'affaires at home, the ideal friend and 
alter ego on whom he could unlimitedly rest, this is a 
proof the more — with the general rarity of such cases 
— of what it was in his nature to make people wish to 
do for him. To Mr. Colvin he is more familiar than to 
any one, more whimsical and natural and frequently 
more inimitable — of all of which a just notion can be 
given only by abundant citation. And yet citation 
itself is embarrassed, with nothing to guide it but his 
perpetual spirits, perpetual acuteness and felicity, 
restlessness of fancy and of judgment. These things 
make him jump from pole to pole and fairly hum, at 
times, among the objects and subjects that filled his 
air, like a charged bee among flowers. 

He is never more delightful than when he is most 
egotistic, most consciously charmed with something he 
has done. 

And the papers are some of them up to dick, and no mistake. I 
agree with you, the lights seem a little turned down. 

When we learn that the articles alluded to are those 
collected in "Across the Plains" we quite assent to this 
impression made by them after a troubled interval, and 
envy the author who, in a far Pacific isle, could see 
"The Lantern Bearers," "A Letter to a Young Gentle- 
man" and " Pulvis et Umbra" float back to him as a 
guarantee of his faculty and between covers constitut- 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 13 

ing the book that is to live. Stevenson's masculine 
wisdom moreover, his remarkable final sanity, is al- 
ways — and it was not what made least in him for happy 
intercourse — close to his comedy and next door to his 
slang. 

And however low the lights are, the stuff is true, and I believe 
the more effective; after all, what I wish to fight is the best fought 
by a rather cheerless presentation of the truth. The world must 
return some day to the word "duty," and be done with the word 
"reward." There are no rewards, and plenty duties. And the 
sooner a man sees that and acts upon it, like a gentleman or a fine 
old barbarian, the better for himself. 

It would perhaps be difficult to quote a single para- 
graph giving more than that of the whole of him. 
But there is abundance of him in this too: 

How do journalists fetch up their drivel ? ... It has taken me 
two months to write 45,500 words; and, be damned to my wicked 
prowess, I am proud of the exploit ! . . . A respectable little five- 
bob volume, to bloom unread in shop windows. After that I'll 
have a spank at fiction. And rest ? I shall rest in the grave, or 
when I come to Italy. If only the public will continue to support 
me ! I lost my chance not dying; there seems blooming little fear 
of it now. I worked close on five hours this morning; the day 
before, close on nine; and unless I finish myself off with this letter 
I'll have another hour and a half, or aiblins tzva, before dinner. 
Poor man, how you must envy me as you hear of these orgies of 
work, and you scarce able for a letter. But Lord ! Colvin, how 
lucky the situations are not reversed, for I have no situation, nor 
am fit for any. Life is a steigh brae. Here, have at Knappe, and 
no more clavers ! 

If he talked profusely — and this is perfect talk — if he 
loved to talk above all of his work in hand, it was be- 
cause, though perpetually frail, he was never inert, and 
did a thing, if he did it at all, with passion. He was 
not fit, he says, for a situation, but a situation overtook 



i 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

him inexorably at Vailima, and doubtless at last in- 
deed swallowed him up. His position, with differences, 
comparing in some respects smaller things to greater, 
and with fewer differences after all than likenesses, 
his position resembles that of Scott at Abbotsford, 
just as, sound, sensible and strong on each side in spite 
of the immense gift of dramatic and poetic vision, the 
earlier and the later man had something of a common 
nature. Life became bigger for each than the answer- 
ing effort could meet, and in their death they were not 
divided. Stevenson's late emancipation was a fairy- 
tale only because he himself was in his manner a magi- 
cian. He liked to handle many matters and to shrink 
from none; nothing can exceed the impression we get 
of the things that in these years he dealt with from day 
to day and as they came up, and the things that, as 
well, almost without order or relief, he planned and 
invented, took up and talked of and dropped, took up 
and talked of and carried through. Had I space to 
treat myself to a clue for selection from the whole 
record there is nothing I should better like it to be than 
a tracking of his "literary opinions" and literary proj- 
ects, the scattered swarm of his views, sympathies, 
antipathies, obiter dicta, as an artist — his flurries and 
fancies, imaginations, evocations, quick infatuations, 
as a teller of possible tales. Here is a whole little circle 
of discussion, yet such a circle that to engage one's self 
at all is to be too much engulfed. 

His overflow on such matters is meanwhile amusing 
enough as mere spirits and sport — interesting as it 
would yet be to catch as we might, at different moments, 
the congruity between the manner of his feeling a fable 
in the germ and that of his afterwards handling it. 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 15 

There are passages again and again that light strikingly 
what I should call his general conscious method in 
this relation, were I not more tempted to call it his 
conscious — for that is what it seems to come to — nega- 
tion of method. A whole delightful letter — to Mr. 
Colvin, February 1, 1892 — is a vivid type. (This letter, 
I may mention, is independently notable for the drollery 
of its allusion to a sense of scandal — of all things in the 
world — excited in some editorial breast by "The Beach 
of Falesa;" which leads him to the highly pertinent 
remark that "this is a poison bad world for the ro- 
mancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it 
by not having any women in it at all." Then he re- 
members he had "The Treasure of Franchard" refused 
as unfit for a family magazine and feels — as well he 
may — "despair weigh upon his wrists." The despair 
haunts him and comes out on another occasion. "Five 
more chapters of David. . . . All love affair; seems 
pretty good to me. Will it do for the young person ? 
I don't know: since the Beach, I know nothing except 
that men are fools and hypocrites, and I know less of 
them than I was fond enough to fancy.") Always a 
part of his physiognomy is the play, so particularly 
salient, of his moral fluctuations, the way his spirits 
are upset by his melancholy and his grand conclusions 
by his rueful doubts. 

He communicates to his confidant with the eager- 
ness of a boy confabulating in holidays over a Christmas 
charade; but I remember no instance of his express- 
ing a subject, as one may say, as a subject — hinting 
at what novelists mainly know, one would imagine, 
as the determinant thing in it, the idea out of which it 
springs. The form, the envelope, is there with him, 



16 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

headforemost, as the idea; titles, names, that is, chap- 
ters, sequences, orders, while we are still asking our- 
selves how it was that he primarily put to his own mind 
what it was all to be about. He simply felt this, evi- 
dently, and it is always the one dumb sound, the stopped 
pipe or only unexpressed thing, in all his contagious 
candour. He finds none the less in the letter to which 
I refer one of the problems of the wonderful projected 
"Sophia Scarlet" "exactly a Balzac one, and I wish I 
had his fist — for I have already a better method — the 
kinetic — whereas he continually allowed himself to be 
led into the static." There we have him — Stevenson, 
not Balzac — at his most overflowing, and after all 
radiantly capable of conceiving at another moment that 
his "better method" would have been none at all for 
Balzac's vision of a subject, least of all of the subject, 
the whole of life. Balzac's method was adapted to 
his notion of presentation — which we may accept, it 
strikes me, under the protection of what he presents. 
Were it not, in fine, as I may repeat, to embark in a 
bigger boat than would here turn round I might note 
further that Stevenson has elsewhere — was disposed in 
general to have — too short a way with this master. 
There is an interesting passage in which he charges 
him with having never known what to leave out, a 
passage which has its bearing on condition of being 
read with due remembrance of the class of performance 
to which "Le Colonel Chabert," for instance, "Le 
Cure de Tours," "LTnterdiction," "La Messe de 
l'Athee" (to name but a few brief masterpieces in a 
long list) appertain. 

These, however, are comparatively small questions; 
the impression, for the reader of the later letters, is 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 17 

simply one of singular beauty — of deepening talent, of 
happier and richer expression, and in especial of an 
ironic desperate gallantry that burns away, with a finer 
and finer fire, in a strange alien air and is only the more 
touching to us from his own resolute consumption of 
the smoke. He had incurred great charges, he sailed a 
ship loaded to the brim, so that the strain under which 
he lived and wrought was immense; but the very grim- 
ness of it all is sunny, slangy, funny, familiar; there is 
as little of the florid in his flashes of melancholy as of 
the really grey under stress of his wisdom. This 
wisdom had sometimes on matters of art, I think, its 
lapses, but on matters of life it was really winged and 
inspired. He has a soundness as to questions of the 
vital connection, a soundness all liberal and easy and 
born of the manly experience, that it is a luxury to 
touch. There are no compunctions nor real impa- 
tiences, for he had in a singular degree got what he 
wanted, the life absolutely discockneyfied, the situation 
as romantically "swagger" as if it had been an imagi- 
nation made real; but his practical anxieties necessarily 
spin themselves finer, and it is just this production of 
the thing imagined that has more and more to meet 
them. It all hung, the situation, by that beautiful 
golden thread, the swinging of which in the wind, as he 
spins it in alternate doubt and elation, we watch with 
much of the suspense and pity with which we sit at the 
serious drama. It is serious in the extreme; yet the 
forcing of production, in the case of a faculty so beauti- 
ful and delicate, affects us almost as the straining of a 
nerve or the distortion of a feature. 

I sometimes sit and yearn for anything in the nature of an in- 
come that would come in — mine has all got to be gone and fished 
for with the immortal mind of man. What I want is the income 



1 8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

that really comes in of itself, while all you have to do is just 
to blossom and exist and sit on chairs. ... I should probably 
amuse myself with works that would make your hair curl, if you 
had any left. 

To read over some of his happiest things, to renew 
one's sense of the extraordinarily fine temper of his 
imagination, is to say to one's self "What a horse to 
have to ride every week to market !" We must all go 
to market, but the most fortunate of us surely are those 
who may drive thither, and on days not too frequent, 
nor by a road too rough, a ruder and homelier animal. 
He touches in more than one place — and with notable 
beauty and real authority in that little mine of felicities 
the "Letter to a Young Gentleman" — on the con- 
science for "frugality" which should be the artist's 
finest point of honour; so that one of his complications 
here was undoubtedly the sense that on this score his 
position had inevitably become somewhat false. The 
literary romantic is by no means necessarily expensive, 
but of the many ways in which the practical, the active, 
has to be paid for this departure from frugality would 
be, it is easy to conceive, not the least. And we per- 
ceive his recognising this as he recognised everything — 
if not in time, then out of it; accepting inconsistency, 
as he always did, with the gaiety of a man of courage — 
not being, that is, however intelligent, priggish for 
logic and the grocer's book any more than for any- 
thing else. Only everything made for keeping it up, 
and it was a great deal to keep up; though when he 
throws off "The Ebb-Tide" and rises to "Catriona," 
and then again to "Weir of Hermiston," as if he could 
rise to almost anything, we breathe anew and look 
longingly forward. The latest of these letters contain 
such admirable things, testify so to the reach of his 









ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 19 

intelligence and in short vibrate so with genius and 
charm, that we feel him at moments not only unex- 
hausted but replenished, and capable perhaps, for all 
we know to the contrary, of new experiments and 
deeper notes. The intelligence and attention are so 
fine that he misses nothing from unawareness; not a 
gossamer thread of the "thought of the time" that, 
wafted to him on the other side of the globe, may not 
be caught in a branch and played with; he puts such a 
soul into nature and such human meanings, for comedy 
and tragedy, into what surrounds him, however shabby 
or short, that he really lives in society by living in his 
own perceptions and generosities or, as we say nowa- 
days, his own atmosphere. In this atmosphere — which 
seems to have had the gift of abounding the more it 
was breathed by others — these pages somehow prompt 
us to see almost every object on his tropic isle bathed 
and refreshed. 

So far at any rate from growing thin for want of 
London he can transmit to London or to its neigh- 
bourhood communications such as it would scarce 
know otherwise where to seek. A letter to his cousin, 
R. A. M. Stevenson, of September 1894, touches so on 
all things and, as he would himself have said, so adorns 
them, brimming over with its happy extravagance of 
thought, that, far again from our feeling Vailima, in 
the light of it, to be out of the world, it strikes us that 
the world has moved for the time to Vailima. There 
is world enough everywhere, he quite unconsciously 
shows, for the individual, the right one, to be what we 
call a man of it. He has, like every one not convenienced 
with the pleasant back-door of stupidity, to make his 
account with seeing and facing more things, seeing 



20 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

and facing everything, with the unrest of new impres- 
sions and ideas, the loss of the fond complacencies of 
youth. 

But as I go on in life, day by day, I become more of a be- 
wildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to 
heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. 
The prim obliterated polite face of life, and the broad, bawdy and 
orgiastic — or maenadic — foundations, form a spectacle to which no 
habit reconciles me; and "I could wish my days to be bound each 
to each" by the same open-mouthed wonder. They are anyway, 
and whether I wish it or not. ... I remember very well your 
attitude to life — this conventional surface of it. You have none of 
that curiosity for the social stage directions, the trivial ficelles of 
the business; it is simian; but that is how the wild youth of man is 
captured. 

The whole letter is enchanting. 

But no doubt there is something great in the half success that 
has attended the effort of turning into an emotional region Bald 
Conduct without any appeal, or almost none, to the figurative, 
mysterious and constitutive facts of life. Not that conduct is 
not constitutive, but dear ! it's dreary ! On the whole, conduct is 
better dealt with on the cast-iron "gentleman" and duty formula, 
with as little fervour and poetry as possible; stoical and short. 

The last letter of all, it will have been abundantly 
noted, has, with one of those characteristically thrown- 
out references to himself that were always half a whim, 
half a truth and all a picture, a remarkable premoni- 
tion. It is addressed to Mr. Edmond Gosse. 

It is all very well to talk of renunciation, and of course it has to 
be done. But for my part, give me a roaring toothache ! I do like 
to be deceived and to dream, but I have very little use for either 
watching or meditation. I was not born for age. ... I am a 
childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed, blighted youth. I have, 
in fact, lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 21 

descend the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to 
go down it is a precipice. . . . You can never write another dedica- 
tion that can give the same pleasure to the vanished Tusitala. 

Two days later he met his end in the happiest form, 
by the straight swift bolt of the gods. It was, as all 
his readers know, with an admirable unfinished thing 
in hand, scarce a quarter written — a composition as 
to which his hopes were, presumably with much justice 
and as they were by no means always, of the highest. 
Nothing is more interesting than the rich way in which, 
in "Weir of Hermiston" and "Catriona," the pre- 
dominant imaginative Scot reasserts himself after gaps 
and lapses, distractions and deflections superficially 
extreme. There are surely few backward jumps of 
this energy more joyous and a pieds joints, or of a kind 
more interesting to a critic. The imaginative vision 
is hungry and tender just in proportion as the actual 
is otherwise beset; so that we must sigh always in vain 
for the quality that this purified flame, as we call it, 
would have been able to give the metal. And how 
many things for the critic the case suggests — how many 
possible reflections cluster about it and seem to take 
light from it! It was "romance" indeed, "Weir of 
Hermiston," we feel, as we see it only grow in assur- 
ance and ease when the reach to it over all the spaces 
becomes more positively artificial. The case is liter- 
ary to intensity, and, given the nature of the talent, 
only thereby the more beautiful: he embroiders in 
silk and silver — in defiance of climate and nature, of 
every near aspect, and with such another antique 
needle as was nowhere, least of all in those latitudes, to 
be bought — in the intervals of wondrous international 
and insular politics and of fifty material cares and com- 
plications. His special stock of association, most per- 



22 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

sonal style and most unteachable trick fly away again 
to him like so many strayed birds to nest, each with 
the flutter in its beak of some scrap of document or 
legend, some fragment of picture or story, to be re- 
touched, revarnished and reframed. 

These things he does with a gusto, moreover, for 
which it must be granted that his literary treatment of 
the islands and the island life had ever vainly waited. 
Curious enough that his years of the tropics and his 
fraternity with the natives never drew from him any 
such " rendered' ' view as might have been looked for 
in advance. For the absent and vanished Scotland he 
has the image — within the limits (too narrow ones we 
may perhaps judge) admitted by his particular po- 
etic; but the law of these things in him was, as of 
many others, amusingly, conscientiously perverse. The 
Pacific, in which he materially delighted, made him 
"descriptively" serious and even rather dry; with his 
own country, on the other hand, materially impos- 
sible, he was ready to tread an endless measure. He 
easily sends us back again here to our vision of his 
mixture. There was only one thing on earth that he 
loved as much as literature — which was the total ab- 
sence of it; and to the present, the immediate, whatever 
it was, he always made the latter offering. Samoa was 
susceptible of no "style" — none of that, above all, 
with which he was most conscious of an affinity — save 
the demonstration of its rightness for life; and this 
left the field abundantly clear for the Border, the Great 
North Road and the eighteenth century. I have been 
reading over "Catriona" and "Weir" with the purest 
pleasure with which we can follow a man of genius — 
that of seeing him abound in his own sense. In "Weir" 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 23 

especially, like an improvising pianist, he superabounds 
and revels, and his own sense, by a happy stroke, ap- 
peared likely never more fully and brightly to justify 
him; to have become even in some degree a new sense, 
with new chords and possibilities. It is the "old game," 
but it is the old game that he exquisitely understands. 
The figure of Hermiston is creative work of the high- 
est order, those of the two Kirsties, especially that of 
the elder, scarce less so; and we ache for the loss of a 
thing which could give out such touches as the quick 
joy, at finding herself in falsehood, of the enamoured 
girl whose brooding elder brother has told her that as 
soon as she has a lover she will begin to lie (" 'Will I 
have gotten my jo now ?' she thought with secret rap- 
ture"); or a passage so richly charged with imagination 
as that in which the young lover recalls her as he has 
first seen and desired her, seated at grey of evening 
on an old tomb in the moorland and unconsciously 
making him think, by her scrap of song, both of his 
mother, who sang it and whom he has lost, and 

of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars com- 
posed, their weapons buried with them, and of these strange change- 
lings, their descendants, who lingered a little in their places and 
would soon be gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloam- 
ing hour. By one of the unconscious arts of tenderness the two 
women were enshrined together in his memory. Tears, in that hour 
of sensibility, came into his eyes indifferently at the thought of 
either; and the girl, from being something merely bright and 
shapely, was caught up into the zone of things serious as life and 
death and his dead mother. So that, in all ways and on either side, 
Fate played his game artfully with this poor pair of children. The 
generations were prepared, the pangs were made ready, before the 
curtain rose on the dark drama. 

It is not a tribute that Stevenson would at all have 
appreciated, but I may not forbear noting how closely 



24 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

such a page recalls many another in the tenderest 
manner of Pierre Loti. There would not, compared, 
be a pin to choose between them. How, we at all 
events ask ourselves as we consider "Weir," could he 
have kept it up ? — while the reason for which he didn't 
reads itself back into his text as a kind of beautiful 
rash divination in him that he mightn't have to. 
Among prose fragments it stands quite alone, with the 
particular grace and sanctity of mutilation worn by 
the marble morsels of masterwork in another art. 
This and the other things of his best he left; but these 
things, lovely as, on rereading many of them at the 
suggestion of his Correspondence, they are, are not 
the whole, nor more than the half, of his abiding 
charm. The finest papers in "Across the Plains," in 
"Memories and Portraits," in "Virginibus Puerisque," 
stout of substance and supremely silver of speech, 
have both a nobleness and a nearness that place them, 
for perfection and roundness, above his fictions, and 
that also may well remind a vulgarised generation of 
what, even under its nose, English prose can be. But 
it is bound up with his name, for our wonder and re- 
flection, that he is something other than the author 
of this or that particular beautiful thing, or of all such 
things together. It has been his fortune (whether or 
no the greatest that can befall a man of letters) to 
have had to consent to become, by a process not purely 
mystic and not wholly untraceable — what shall we call 
it ? — a Figure. Tracing is needless now, for the per- 
sonality has acted and the incarnation is full. There 
he is — he has passed inefFaceably into happy legend. 
This case of the figure is of the rarest and the honour 
surely of the greatest. In all our literature we can 
count them, sometimes with the work and sometimes 



ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 25 

without. The work has often been great and yet the 
figure nil. Johnson was one, and Goldsmith and 
Byron; and the two former moreover not in any degree, 
like Stevenson, in virtue of the element of grace. Was 
it this element that fixed the claim even for Byron ? 
It seems doubtful; and the list at all events as we ap- 
proach our own day shortens and stops. Stevenson 
has it at present — may we not say ? — pretty well to 
himself, and it is not one of the scrolls in which he 
least will live. 



EMILE ZOLA 

If it be true that the critical spirit to-day, in presence 
of the rising tide of prose fiction, a watery waste out 
of which old standards and landmarks are seen barely 
to emerge, like chimneys and the tops of trees in a 
country under flood — if it be true that the anxious 
observer, with the water up to his chin, finds himself 
asking for the reason of the strange phenomenon, for 
its warrant and title, so we likewise make out that 
these credentials rather fail to float on the surface. 
We live in a world of wanton and importunate fable, 
we breathe its air and consume its fruits; yet who shall 
say that we are able, when invited, to account for 
our preferring it so largely to the world of fact ? To 
do so would be to make some adequate statement of 
the good the product in question does us. What does 
it do for our life, our mind, our manners, our morals 
— what does it do that history, poetry, philosophy may 
not do, as well or better, to warn, to comfort and com- 
mand the countless thousands for whom and by whom 
it comes into being ? We seem too often left with our 
riddle on our hands. The lame conclusion on which 
we retreat is that "stories" are multiplied, circulated, 
paid for, on the scale of the present hour, simply be- 
cause people "like" them. As to why people should 
like anything so loose and mean as the preponderant 
mass of the "output," so little indebted for the magic 
of its action to any mystery in the making, is more than 
the actual state of our perceptions enables us to say. 

26 



fiMILE ZOLA 27 

This bewilderment might be our last word if it were 
not for the occasional occurrence of accidents especially 
appointed to straighten out a little our tangle. We 
are reminded that if the unnatural prosperity of the 
wanton fable cannot be adequately explained, it can at 
least be illustrated with a sharpness that is practically 
an argument. An abstract solution failing we encoun- 
ter it in the concrete. We catch in short a new impres- 
sion or, to speak more truly, recover an old one. It 
was always there to be had, but we ourselves throw off 
an oblivion, an indifference for which there are plenty 
of excuses. We become conscious, for our profit, of a 
case, and we see that our mystification came from the 
way cases had appeared for so long to fail us. None of 
the shapeless forms about us for the time had attained 
to the dignity of one. The one I am now conceiving 
as suddenly effective — for which I fear I must have 
been regarding it as somewhat in eclipse — is that of 
Emile Zola, whom, as a manifestation of the sort we 
are considering, three or four striking facts have lately 
combined to render more objective and, so to speak, 
more massive. His close connection with the most 
resounding of recent public quarrels; his premature and 
disastrous death; above all, at the moment I write, the 
appearance of his last-finished novel, bequeathed to 
his huge public from beyond the grave — these rapid 
events have thrust him forward and made him loom 
abruptly larger; much as if our pedestrian critic, 
treading the dusty highway, had turned a sharp corner. 

It is not assuredly that Zola has ever been veiled or 
unapparent; he had, on the contrary been digging his 
field these thirty years, and for all passers to see, with 
an industry that kept him, after the fashion of one of 



28 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

the grand grim sowers or reapers of his brother of the 
brush, or at least of the canvas, Jean-Francois Millet, 
duskily outlined against the sky. He was there in the 
landscape of labour — he had always been; but he was 
there as a big natural or pictorial feature, a spreading 
tree, a battered tower, a lumpish round-shouldered use- 
ful hayrick, confounded with the air and the weather, 
the rain and the shine, the day and the dusk, merged 
more or less, as it were, in the play of the elements 
themselves. We had got used to him, and, thanks in 
a measure just to this stoutness of his presence, to the 
long regularity of his performance, had come to notice 
him hardly more than the dwellers in the marketplace 
notice the quarters struck by the town-clock. On top 
of all accordingly, for our skeptical mood, the sense of 
his work — a sense determined afresh by the strange 
climax of his personal history — rings out almost with 
violence as a reply to our wonder. It is as if an earth- 
quake or some other rude interference had shaken 
from the town-clock a note of such unusual depth as 
to compel attention. We therefore once more give 
heed, and the result of this is that we feel ourselves 
after a little probably as much enlightened as we can 
hope ever to be. We have worked round to the so 
marked and impressive anomaly of the adoption of 
the futile art by one of the stoutest minds and stoutest 
characters of our time. This extraordinarily robust 
worker has found it good enough for him, and if the 
fact is, as I say, anomalous, we are doubtless helped 
to conclude that by its anomalies, in future, the bank- 
rupt business, as we are so often moved to pronounce 
it, will most recover credit. 

What is at all events striking for us, critically speak- 
ing, is that, in the midst of the dishonour it has gradu- 



fiVIILE ZOLA 29 

ally harvested by triumphant vulgarity of practice, its 
pliancy and applicability can still plead for themselves. 
The curious contradiction stands forth for our relief — 
the circumstance that thirty years ago a young man of 
extraordinary brain and indomitable purpose, wishing 
to give the measure of these endowments in a piece of 
work supremely solid, conceived and sat down to Les 
Rougon-Macquart rather than to an equal task in 
physics, mathematics, politics or economics. He saw 
his undertaking, thanks to his patience and courage, 
practically to a close; so that it is exactly neither of the 
so-called constructive sciences that happens to have had 
the benefit, intellectually speaking, of one of the few 
most constructive achievements of our time. There 
then, provisionally at least, we touch bottom; we get a 
glimpse of the pliancy and variety, the ideal of vivid- 
ness, on behalf of which our equivocal form may appeal 
to a strong head. In the name of what ideal on its 
own side, however, does the strong head yield to the 
appeal ? What is the logic of its so deeply committing 
itself ? Zola's case seems to tell us, as it tells us other 
things. The logic is in its huge freedom of adjust- 
ment to the temperament of the worker, which it 
carries, so to say, as no other vehicle can do. It ex- 
presses fully and directly the whole man, and big as 
he may be it can still be big enough for him without 
becoming false to its type. We see this truth made 
strong, from beginning to end, in Zola's work; we see 
the temperament, we see the whole man, with his size 
and all his marks, stored and packed away in the huge 
hold of Les Rougon-Macquart as a cargo is packed 
away on a ship. His personality is the thing that 
finally pervades and prevails, just as so often on a 
vessel the presence of the cargo makes itself felt for 
the assaulted senses. What has most come home to 



3 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

me in reading him over is that a scheme of fiction so 
conducted is in fact a capacious vessel. It can carry- 
any thing — with art and force in the stowage; nothing 
in this case will sink it. And it is the only form for 
which such a claim can be made. All others have to 
confess to a smaller scope — to selection, to exclusion, 
to the danger of distortion, explosion, combustion. 
The novel has nothing to fear but sailing too light. It 
will take aboard all we bring in good faith to the dock. 

An intense vision of this truth must have been Zola's 
comfort from the earliest time — the years, immediately 
following the crash of the Empire, during which he 
settled himself to the tremendous task he had mapped 
out. No finer act of courage and confidence, I think, 
is recorded in the history of letters. The critic in 
sympathy with him returns again and again to the 
great wonder of it, in which something so strange is 
mixed with something so august. Entertained and 
carried out almost from the threshold of manhood, the 
high project, the work of a lifetime, announces before- 
hand its inevitable weakness and yet speaks in the same 
voice for its admirable, its almost unimaginable strength. 
The strength was in the young man's very person — 
in his character, his will, his passion, his fighting 
temper, his aggressive lips, his squared shoulders (when 
he "sat up") and overweening confidence; his weak- 
ness was in that inexperience of life from which he 
proposed not to suffer, from which he in fact suffered 
on the surface remarkably little, and from which he 
was never to suspect, I judge, that he had suffered at 
all. I may mention for the interest of it that, meeting 
him during his first short visit to London — made sev- 
eral years before his stay in England during the Dreyfus 



&VIILE ZOLA 31 

trial — I received a direct impression of him that was 
more informing than any previous study. I had seen 
him a little, in Paris, years before that, when this im- 
pression was a perceptible promise, and I was now to 
perceive how time had made it good. It consisted, 
simply stated, in his fairly bristling with the betrayal 
that nothing whatever had happened to him in life but 
to write Les Rougon-Macquart. It was even for that 
matter almost more as if Les Rougon-Macquart had 
written him, written him as he stood and sat, as he 
looked and spoke, as the long, concentrated, merciless 
effort had made and stamped and left him. Some- 
thing very fundamental was to happen to him in due 
course, it is true, shaking him to his base; fate was not 
wholly to cheat him of an independent evolution. Re- 
calling him from this London hour one strongly felt 
during the famous "Affair" that his outbreak in con- 
nection with it was the act of a man with arrears of 
personal history to make up, the act of a spirit for 
which life, or for which at any rate freedom, had been 
too much postponed, treating itself at last to a luxury 
of experience. 

I welcomed the general impression at all events — 
I intimately entertained it; it represented so many 
things, it suggested, just as it was, such a lesson. You 
could neither have everything nor be everything — you 
had to choose; you could not at once sit firm at your 
job and wander through space inviting initiations. 
The author of Les Rougon-Macquart had had all 
those, certainly, that this wonderful company could 
bring him; but I can scarce express how it was implied 
in him that his time had been fruitfully passed with 
them alone. His artistic evolution struck one thus as, 



32 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

in spite of its magnitude, singularly simple, and evi- 
dence of the simplicity seems further offered by his last 
production, of which we have just come into possession. 
"Verite" truly does give the measure, makes the 
author's high maturity join hands with his youth, 
marks the rigid straightness of his course from point 
to point. He had seen his horizon and his fixed goal 
from the first, and no cross-scent, no new distance, no 
blue gap in the hills to right or to left ever tempted 
him to stray. "Verite," of which I shall have more to 
say, is in fact, as a moral finality and the crown of an 
edifice, one of the strangest possible performances. 
Machine-minted and made good by an immense ex- 
pertness, it yet makes us ask how, for disinterested 
observation and perception, the writer had used so 
much time and so much acquisition, and how he can 
all along have handled so much material without some 
larger subjective consequence. We really rub our eyes 
in other words to see so great an intellectual adventure 
as Les Rougon-Macquart come to its end in deep 
desert sand. Difficult truly to read, because showing 
him at last almost completely a prey to the danger 
that had for a long time more and more dogged his 
steps, the danger of the mechanical all confident and 
triumphant, the book is nevertheless full of interest 
for a reader desirous to penetrate. It speaks with 
more distinctness of the author's temperament, tone 
and manner than if, like several of his volumes, it 
achieved or enjoyed a successful life of its own. Its 
heavy completeness, with all this, as of some prodig- 
iously neat, strong and complicated scaffolding con- 
structed by a firm of builders for the erection of a house 
whose foundations refuse to bear it and that is unable 
therefore to rise — its very betrayal of a method and a 



fiMILE ZOLA 33 

habit more than adequate, on past occasions, to similar 
ends, carries us back to the original rare exhibition, the 
grand assurance and grand patience with which the 
system was launched. 

If it topples over, the system, by its own weight in 
these last applications of it, that only makes the his- 
tory of its prolonged success the more curious and, 
speaking for myself, the spectacle of its origin more 
attaching. Readers of my generation will remember 
well the publication of "La Conquete de Plassans" 
and the portent, indefinable but irresistible, after peru- 
sal of the volume, conveyed in the general rubric under 
which it was a first instalment, Natural and Social 
History of a Family under the Second Empire. It 
squared itself there at its ease, the announcement, from 
the first, and we were to learn promptly enough what a 
fund of life it masked. It was like the mouth of a cave 
with a signboard hung above, or better still perhaps 
like the big booth at a fair with the name of the show 
across the flapping canvas. One strange animal after 
another stepped forth into the light, each in its way a 
monster bristling and spotted, each a curiosity of that 
"natural history" in the name of which we were ad- 
dressed, though it was doubtless not till the issue of 
"L'Assommoir" that the true type of the monstrous 
seemed to be reached. The enterprise, for those who 
had attention, was even at a distance impressive, and 
the nearer the critic gets to it retrospectively the more 
so it becomes. The pyramid had been planned and 
the site staked out, but the young builder stood there, 
in his sturdy strength, with no equipment save his two 
hands and, as we may say, his wheelbarrow and his 
trowel. His pile of material — of stone, brick and rub- 



34 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

ble or whatever — was of the smallest, but this he ap- 
parently felt as the least of his difficulties. Poor, un- 
instructed, unacquainted, unintroduced, he set up his 
subject wholly from the outside, proposing to himself 
wonderfully to get into it, into its depths, as he went. 

If we imagine him asking himself what he knew of 
the "social" life of the second Empire to start with, 
we imagine him also answering in all honesty: "I have 
my eyes and my ears — I have all my senses: I have 
what Fve seen and heard, what I've smelled and tasted 
and touched. And then I've my curiosity and my per- 
tinacity; Fve libraries, books, newspapers, witnesses, 
the material, from step to step, of an enquete. And 
then I've my genius — that is, my imagination, my 
passion, my sensibility to life. Lastly Fve my method, 
and that will be half the battle. Best of all perhaps 
even, Fve plentiful lack of doubt." Of the absence in 
him of a doubt, indeed of his inability, once his direc- 
tion taken, to entertain so much as the shadow of one, 
"Verite" is a positive monument — which again rep- 
resents in this way the unity of his tone and the meet- 
ing of his extremes. If we remember that his design 
was nothing if not architectural, that a "majestic 
whole," a great balanced facade, with all its orders 
and parts, that a singleness of mass and a unity of 
effect, in fine, were before him from the first, his no- 
tion of picking up his bricks as he proceeded becomes, 
in operation, heroic. It is not in the least as a record 
of failure for him that I note this particular fact of 
the growth of the long series as on the whole the live- 
liest interest it has to offer. "I don't know my subject, 
but I must live into it; I don't know life, but I must 
learn it as I work" — that attitude and programme rep- 



fiMILE ZOLA 35 

resent, to my sense, a drama more intense on the 
worker's own part than any of the dramas he was to 
invent and put before us. 

It was the fortune, it was in a manner the doom, of 
Les Rougon-Macquart to deal with things almost 
always in gregarious form, to be a picture of numbers, 
of classes, crowds, confusions, movements, industries — 
and this for a reason of which it will be interesting to 
attempt some account. The individual life is, if not 
wholly absent, reflected in coarse and common, in 
generalised terms; whereby we arrive precisely at the 
oddity just named, the circumstance that, looking out 
somewhere, and often woefully athirst, for the taste 
of fineness, we find it not in the fruits of our author's 
fancy, but in a different matter altogether. We get 
it in the very history of his effort, the image itself of 
his lifelong process, comparatively so personal, so 
spiritual even, and, through all its patience and pain, of 
a quality so much more distinguished than the qualities 
he succeeds in attributing to his figures even when he 
most aims at distinction. There can be no question 
in these narrow limits of my taking the successive vol- 
umes one by one — all the more that our sense of the 
exhibition is as little as possible an impression of 
parts and books, of particular "plots" and persons. 
It produces the effect of a mass of imagery in which 
shades are sacrificed, the effect of character and pas- 
sion in the lump or by the ton. The fullest, the most 
characteristic episodes affect us like a sounding chorus 
or procession, as with a hubbub of voices and a multi- 
tudinous tread of feet. The setter of the mass into 
motion, he himself, in the crowd, figures best, with 
whatever queer idiosyncrasies, excrescences and gaps, a 



36 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

being of a substance akin to our own. Taking him as 
we must, I repeat, for quite heroic, the interest of 
detail in him is the interest of his struggle at every point 
with his problem. 

The sense for crowds and processions, for the gross 
and the general, was largely the result of this predica- 
ment, of the disproportion between his scheme and 
his material — though it was certainly also in part an 
effect of his particular turn of mind. What the reader 
easily discerns in him is the sturdy resolution with 
which breadth and energy supply the place of penetra- 
tion. He rests to his utmost on his documents, de- 
vours and assimilates them, makes them yield him 
extraordinary appearances of life; but in his way he 
too improvises in the grand manner, the manner of 
Walter Scott and of Dumas the elder. We feel that 
he has to improvise for his moral and social world, the 
world as to which vision and opportunity must come, 
if they are to come at all, unhurried and unhustled — 
must take their own time, helped undoubtedly more 
or less by blue-books, reports and interviews, by in- 
quiries "on the spot," but never wholly replaced by 
such substitutes without a general disfigurement. 
Vision and opportunity reside in a personal sense and a 
personal history, and no short cut to them in the in- 
terest of plausible fiction has ever been discovered. 
The short cut, it is not too much to say, was with Zola 
the subject of constant ingenious experiment, and it is 
largely to this source, I surmise, that we owe the cele- 
brated element of his grossness. He was obliged to 
be gross, on his system, or neglect to his cost an in- 
valuable aid to representation, as well as one that ap- 
parently struck him as lying close at hand; and I can- 



£MILE ZOLA 37 

not withhold my frank admiration from the courage and 
consistency with which he faced his need. 

His general subject in the last analysis was the na- 
ture of man; in dealing with which he took up, obvious- 
ly, the harp of most numerous strings. His business was 
to make these strings sound true, and there were none 
that he did not, so far as his general economy permitted, 
persistently try. What happened then was that many 
— say about half, and these, as I have noted, the most 
silvered, the most golden — refused to give out their 
music. They would only sound false, since (as with 
all his earnestness he must have felt) he could com- 
mand them, through want of skill, of practice, of ear, 
to none of the right harmony. What therefore was 
more natural than that, still splendidly bent on pro- 
ducing his illusion, he should throw himself on the 
strings he might thump with effect, and should work 
them, as our phrase is, for all they were worth ? The 
nature of man, he had plentiful warrant for holding, 
is an extraordinary mixture, but the great thing was 
to represent a sufficient part of it to show that it was 
solidly, palpably, commonly the nature. With this 
preoccupation he doubtless fell into extravagance — 
there was clearly so much to lead him on. The coarser 
side of his subject, based on the community of all the 
instincts, was for instance the more practicable side, a 
sphere the vision of which required but the general 
human, scarcely more than the plain physical, initi- 
ation, and dispensed thereby conveniently enough with 
special introductions or revelations. A free entry into 
this sphere was undoubtedly compatible with a youth- 
ful career as hampered right and left even as Zola's 
own. 



38 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

He was in prompt possession thus of the range of 
sympathy that he could cultivate, though it must be 
added that the complete exercise of that sympathy 
might have encountered an obstacle that would some- 
what undermine his advantage. Our friend might 
have found himself able, in other words, to pay to 
the instinctive, as I have called it, only such tribute 
as protesting taste (his own dose of it) permitted. Yet 
there it was again that fortune and his temperament 
served him. Taste as he knew it, taste as his own 
constitution supplied it, proved to have nothing to say 
to the matter. His own dose of the precious elixir 
had no perceptible regulating power. Paradoxical as 
the remark may sound, this accident was positively to 
operate as one of his greatest felicities. There are 
parts of his work, those dealing with romantic or poetic 
elements, in which the inactivity of the principle in 
question is sufficiently hurtful; but it surely should 
not be described as hurtful to such pictures as "Le 
Ventre de Paris," as "L'Assommoir," as " Germinal. " 
The conception on which each of these productions 
rests is that of a world with which taste has nothing to 
do, and though the act of representation may be justly 
held, as an artistic act, to involve its presence, the dis- 
crimination would probably have been in fact, given 
the particular illusion sought, more detrimental than 
the deficiency. There was a great outcry, as we all 
remember, over the rank materialism of "L'Assom- 
moir," but who cannot see to-day how much a milder 
infusion of it would have told against the close em- 
brace of the subject aimed at ? "L'Assommoir" is the 
nature of man — but not his finer, nobler, cleaner or 
more cultivated nature; it is the image of his free in- 
stincts, the better and the worse, the better struggling 



£MILE ZOLA 39 

as they can, gasping for light and air, the worse making 
themselves at home in darkness, ignorance and poverty. 
The whole handling makes for emphasis and scale, and 
it is not to be measured how, as a picture of conditions, 
the thing would have suffered from timidity. The 
qualification of the painter was precisely his stoutness 
of stomach, and we scarce exceed in saying that to 
have taken in and given out again less of the infected 
air would, with such a resource, have meant the waste 
of a faculty. 

I may add in this connection moreover that refine- 
ment of intention did on occasion and after a fashion 
of its own unmistakably preside at these experiments; 
making the remark in order to have done once for all 
with a feature of Zola's literary physiognomy that ap- 
pears to have attached the gaze of many persons to 
the exclusion of every other. There are judges in 
these matters so perversely preoccupied that for them 
to see anywhere the "improper'' is for them straight- 
way to cease to see anything else. The said improper, 
looming supremely large and casting all the varieties 
of the proper quite into the shade, suffers thus in their 
consciousness a much greater extension than it ever 
claimed, and this consciousness becomes, for the edi- 
fication of many and the information of a few, a colossal 
reflector and record of it. Much may be said, in re- 
lation to some of the possibilities of the nature of man, 
of the nature in especial of the "people," on the defect 
of our author's sense of proportion. But the sense of 
proportion of many of those he has scandalised would 
take us further yet. I recall at all events as relevant 
— for it comes under a very attaching general head — 
two occasions of long ago, two Sunday afternoons in 



4 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Paris, on which I found the question of intention very 
curiously lighted. Several men of letters of a group 
in which almost every member either had arrived at 
renown or was well on his way to it, were assembled 
under the roof of the most distinguished of their num- 
ber, where they exchanged free confidences on current 
work, on plans and ambitions, in a manner full of in- 
terest for one never previously privileged to see ar- 
tistic conviction, artistic passion (at least on the liter- 
ary ground) so systematic and so articulate. "Well, I 
on my side," I remember Zola's saying, "am engaged 
on a book, a study of the mceurs of the people, for which 
I am making a collection of all the 'bad words,' the 
gros mots, of the language, those with which the vo- 
cabulary of the people, those with which their familiar 
talk, bristles." I was struck with the tone in which 
he made the announcement — without bravado and 
without apology, as an interesting idea that had come 
to him and that he was working, really to arrive at 
character and particular truth, with all his conscience; 
just as I was struck with the unqualified interest that 
his plan excited. It was on a plan that he was work- 
ing — formidably, almost grimly, as his fatigued face 
showed; and the whole consideration of this interesting 
element partook of the general seriousness. 

But there comes back to me also as a companion- 
piece to this another day, after some interval, on which 
the interest was excited by the fact that the work for 
love of which the brave license had been taken was 
actually under the ban of the daily newspaper that had 
engaged to "serialise" it. Publication had definitively 
ceased. The thing had run a part of its course, but it 
had outrun the courage of editors and the curiosity 



fiMILE ZOLA 41 

of subscribers — that stout curiosity to which it had 
evidently in such good faith been addressed. The 
chorus of contempt for the ways of such people, their 
pusillanimity, their superficiality, vulgarity, intellec- 
tual platitude, was the striking note on this occa- 
sion; for the journal impugned had declined to pro- 
ceed and the serial, broken off, been obliged, if I am 
not mistaken, to seek the hospitality of other columns, 
secured indeed with no great difficulty. The com- 
position so qualified for future fame was none other, 
as I was later to learn, than "L'Assommoir"; and my 
reminiscence has perhaps no greater point than in 
connecting itself with a matter always dear to the 
critical spirit, especially when the latter has not too 
completely elbowed out the romantic — the matter of 
the "origins," the early consciousness, early steps, 
early tribulations, early obscurity, as so often happens, 
of productions finally crowned by time. 

Their greatness is for the most part a thing that has 
originally begun so small; and this impression is par- 
ticularly strong when we have been in any degree 
present, so to speak, at the birth. The course of the 
matter is apt to tend preponderantly in that case to 
enrich our stores of irony. In the eventual conquest of 
consideration by an abused book we recognise, in 
other terms, a drama of romantic interest, a drama 
often with large comic no less than with fine pathetic 
interweavings. It may of course be said in this par- 
ticular connection that "L'Assommoir" had not been 
one of the literary things that creep humbly into the 
world. Its "success" may be cited as almost insolently 
prompt, and the fact remains true if the idea of suc- 
cess be restricted, after the inveterate fashion, to the 






42 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

idea of circulation. What remains truer still, however, 
is that for the critical spirit circulation mostly matters 
not the least little bit, and it is of the success with which 
the history of Gervaise and Coupeau nestles in that 
capacious bosom, even as the just man sleeps in Abra- 
ham's, that I here speak. But it is a point I may better 
refer to a moment hence. 

Though a summary study of Zola need not too 
anxiously concern itself with book after book — always 
with a partial exception from this remark for "L'As- 
sommoir ,, — groups and varieties none the less exist in 
the huge series, aids to discrimination without which 
no measure of the presiding genius is possible. These 
divisions range themselves to my sight, roughly speak- 
ing, however, as scarce more than three in number — 
I mean if the ten volumes of the GEuvres Critiques 
and the Theatre be left out of account. The critical 
volumes in especial abound in the characteristic, as 
they were also a wondrous addition to his sum of 
achievement during his most strenuous years. But I 
am forced not to consider them. The two groups 
constituted after the close of Les Rougon-Macquart 
— "Les Trois Villes" and the incomplete "Quatre 
Evangiles" — distribute themselves easily among the 
three types, or, to speak more exactly, stand together 
under one of the three. This one, so comprehensive 
as to be the author's main exhibition, includes to my 
sense all his best volumes — to the point in fact of pro- 
ducing an effect of distinct inferiority for those outside 
of it, which are, luckily for his general credit, the less 
numerous. It is so inveterately pointed out in any 
allusion to him that one shrinks, in repeating it, from 
sounding flat; but as he was admirably equipped from 
the start for the evocation of number and quantity, so 



filVIILE ZOLA 43 

those of his social pictures that most easily surpass 
the others are those in which appearances, the appear- 
ances familiar to him, are at once most magnified and 
most multiplied* 

To make his characters swarm, and to make the 
great central thing they swarm about "as large as life,'' 
portentously, heroically big, that was the task he set 
himself very nearly from the first, that was the secret 
he triumphantly mastered. Add that the big central 
thing was always some highly representative institu- 
tion or industry of the France of his time, some seated 
Moloch of custom, of commerce, of faith, lending it- 
self to portrayal through its abuses and excesses, its 
idol-face and great devouring mouth, and we embrace 
the main lines of his attack. In "Le Ventre de Paris " 
he had dealt with the life of the huge Halles, the gen- 
eral markets and their supply, the personal forces, 
personal situations, passions, involved in (strangest of 
all subjects) the alimentation of the monstrous city, 
the city whose victualling occupies so inordinately 
much of its consciousness. Paris richly gorged, Paris 
sublime and indifferent in her assurance (so all unlike 
poor Oliver's) of "more," figures here the theme it- 
self, lies across the scene like some vast ruminant 
creature breathing in a cloud of parasites. The book 
was the first of the long series to show the full freedom 
of the author's hand, though "La Curee" had already 
been symptomatic. This freedom, after an interval, 
broke out on a much bigger scale in "L'Assommoir," 
in "Au Bonheur des Dames," in "Germinal," in "La 
Bete Humaine," in "L'Argent," in "La Debacle," 
and then again, though more mechanically and with 
much of the glory gone, in the more or less wasted 



44 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

energy of "Lourdes," "Rome," "Paris," of "Fecon- 
(lite," "Travail" and "Verite." 

"Au Bonheur des Dames" handles the colossal 
modern shop, traces the growth of such an organisa- 
tion as the Bon Marche or the Magasin-du-Louvre, 
sounds the abysses of its inner life, marshals its popu- 
lation, its hierarchy of clerks, counters, departments, 
divisions and sub-divisions, plunges into the labyrinth 
of the mutual relations of its staff, and above all traces 
its ravage amid the smaller fry of the trade, of all the 
trades, pictures these latter gasping for breath in an 
air pumped clean by its mighty lungs. "Germinal" 
revolves about the coal-mines of Flemish France, with 
the subterranean world of the pits for its central pres- 
ence, just as "La Bete Humaine" has for its protago- 
nist a great railway and "L'Argent" presents in terms 
of human passion — mainly of human baseness — the 
fury of the Bourse and the monster of Credit. "La 
Debacle" takes up with extraordinary breadth the first 
act of the Franco-Prussian war, the collapse at Sedan, 
and the titles of the six volumes of The Three Cities 
and the Four Gospels sufficiently explain them. I 
may mention, however, for the last lucidity, that 
among these "Fecondite" manipulates, with an amaz- 
ing misapprehension of means to ends, of remedies to 
ills, no less thickly peopled a theme than that of the 
decline in the French birth-rate, and that "Verite" 
presents a fictive equivalent of the Dreyfus case, with 
a vast and elaborate picture of the battle in France 
between lay and clerical instruction. I may even 
further mention, to clear the ground, that with the 
close of Les Rougon-Macquart the diminution of 
freshness in the author's energy, the diminution of in- 



£MILE ZOLA 45 

tensity and, in short, of quality, becomes such as to 
render sadly difficult a happy life with some of the 
later volumes. Happiness of the purest strain never 
indeed, in old absorptions of Zola, quite sat at the 
feast; but there was mostly a measure of coercion, a 
spell without a charm. From these last-named pro- 
ductions of the climax everything strikes me as absent 
but quantity ("Verite," for instance, is, with the pos- 
sible exception of "Nana," the longest of the list); 
though indeed there is something impressive in the 
way his quantity represents his patience. 

There are efforts here at stout perusal that, frankly, 
I have been unable to carry through, and I should 
verily like, in connection with the vanity of these, to 
dispose on the spot of the sufficiently strange phenom- 
enon constituted by what I have called the climax. 
It embodies in fact an immense anomaly; it casts back 
over Zola's prime and his middle years the queerest 
grey light of eclipse. Nothing moreover — nothing 
" literary" — was ever so odd as in this matter the whole 
turn of the case, the consummation so logical yet so 
unexpected. Writers have grown old and withered 
and failed; they have grown weak and sad; they have 
lost heart, lost ability, yielded in one way or another 
— the possible ways being so numerous — to the cruelty 
of time. But the singular doom of this genius, and 
which began to multiply its symptoms ten years before 
his death, was to find, with life, at fifty, still rich in 
him, strength only to undermine all the "authority" 
he had gathered. He had not grown old and he had 
not grown feeble; he had only grown all too wrongly 
insistent, setting himself to wreck, poetically, his so 
massive identity — to wreck it in the very waters in 



46 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

which he had formally arrayed his victorious fleet. 
(I say "poetically" on purpose to give him the just 
benefit of all the beauty of his power.) The process 
of the disaster, so full of the effect, though so without 
the intention, of perversity, is difficult to trace in a few 
words; it may best be indicated by an example or two 
of its action. 

The example that perhaps most comes home to me 
is again connected with a personal reminiscence. In 
the course of some talk that I had with him during 
his first visit to England I happened to ask him what 
opportunity to travel (if any) his immense application 
had ever left him, and whether in particular he had been 
able to see Italy, a country from which I had either 
just returned or which I was luckily — not having the 
Natural History of a Family on my hands — about to 
revisit. "All I've done, alas," he replied, "was, the 
other year, in the course of a little journey to the south, 
to my own pays — all that has been possible was then 
to make a little dash as far as Genoa, a matter of only 
a few days." "Le Docteur Pascal," the conclusion 
of Les Rougon-Macquart, had appeared shortly before, 
and it further befell that I asked him what plans he 
had for the future, now that, still dans la force de 
I'dge, he had so cleared the ground. I shall never 
forget the fine promptitude of his answer — "Oh, I 
shall begin at once Les Trois Villes." "And which 
cities are they to be?" The reply was finer still — 
"Lourdes, Paris, Rome." 

It was splendid for confidence and cheer, but it left 
me, I fear, more or less gaping, and it was to give me 
afterwards the key, critically speaking, to many a 



fiMILE ZOLA 47 

mystery. It struck me as breathing to an almost 
tragic degree the fatuity of those in whom the gods 
stimulate that vice to their ruin. He was an honest 
man — he had always bristled with it at every pore; 
but no artistic reverse was inconceivable for an adven- 
turer who, stating in one breath that his knowledge of 
Italy consisted of a few days spent at Genoa, was 
ready to declare in the next that he had planned, on a 
scale, a picture of Rome. It flooded his career, to my 
sense, with light; it showed how he had marched from 
subject to subject and had "got up" each in turn — 
showing also how consummately he had reduced such 
getting-up to an artifice. He had success and a rare 
impunity behind him, but nothing would now be so 
interesting as to see if he could again play the trick. 
One would leave him, and welcome, Lourdes and 
Paris — he had already dealt, on a scale, with his own 
country and people. But was the adored Rome also 
to be his on such terms, the Rome he was already 
giving away before possessing an inch of it ? One 
thought of one's own frequentations, saturations — a 
history of long years, and of how the effect of them 
had somehow been but to make the subject too august. 
Was he to find it easy through a visit of a month or two 
with "introductions" and a Baedeker? 

It was not indeed that the Baedeker and the intro- 
ductions didn't show, to my sense, at that hour, as 
extremely suggestive; they were positively a part of 
the light struck out by his announcement. They de- 
fined the system on which he had brought Les Rougon- 
Macquart safely into port. He had had his Baedeker 
and his introductions for "Germinal," for "L'Assom- 
moir," for "L'Argent," for "La Debacle," for "Au 



48 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Bonheur des Dames"; which advantages, which re- 
searches, had clearly been all the more in character for 
being documentary, extractive, a matter of renseigne- 
ments, published or private, even when most mixed 
with personal impressions snatched, with enquetes sur 
les lieuxy with facts obtained from the best authorities, 
proud and happy to co-operate in so famous a connec- 
tion. That was, as we say, all right, all the more that 
the process, to my imagination, became vivid and was 
wonderfully reflected back from its fruits. There were 
the fruits — so it hadn't been presumptuous. Presump- 
tion, however, was now to begin, and what omen 
mightn't there be in its beginning with such compla- 
cency ? Well, time would show — as time in due course 
effectually did. "Rome," as the second volume of 
The Three Cities, appeared with high punctuality a 
year or two later; and the interesting question, an oc- 
casion really for the moralist, was by that time not to 
recognise in it the mere triumph of a mechanical art, 
a "receipt" applied with the skill of long practice, but 
to do much more than this — that is really to give a 
name to the particular shade of blindness that could 
constitute a trap for so great an artistic intelligence. 
The presumptuous volume, without sweetness, without 
antecedents, superficial and violent, has the minimum 
instead of the maximum of value; so that it betrayed 
or "gave away" just in this degree the state of mind 
on the author's part responsible for its inflated hollow- 
ness. To put one's finger on the state of mind was to 
find out accordingly what was, as we say, the matter 
with him. 

It seemed to me, I remember, that I found out as 
never before when, in its turn, "Fecondite" began the 



fiMILE ZOLA 49 

work of crowning the edifice. "Fecondite" is physio- 
logical, whereas "Rome" is not, whereas "Verite" 
likewise is not; yet these three productions joined hands 
at a given moment to fit into the lock of the mystery 
the key of my meditation. They came to the same 
thing, to the extent of permitting me to read into them 
together the same precious lesson. This lesson may 
not, barely stated, sound remarkable; yet without 
being in possession of it I should have ventured on 
none of these remarks. "The matter with" Zola then, 
so far as it goes, was that, as the imagination of the 
artist is in the best cases not only clarified but intensi- 
fied by his equal possession of Taste (deserving here if 
ever the old-fashioned honour of a capital) so when he 
has lucklessly never inherited that auxiliary blessing 
the imagination itself inevitably breaks down as a 
consequence. There is simply no limit, in fine, to the 
misfortune of being tasteless; it does not merely dis- 
figure the surface and the fringe of your performance 
— it eats back into the very heart and enfeebles the 
sources of life. When you have no taste you have no 
discretion, which is the conscience of taste, and when 
you have no discretion you perpetrate books like 
"Rome," which are without intellectual modesty, books 
like "Fecondite," which are without a sense of the 
ridiculous, books like "Verite," which are without the 
finer vision of human experience. 

It is marked that in each of these examples the de- 
ficiency has been directly fatal. No stranger doom 
was ever appointed for a man so plainly desiring only 
to be just than the absurdity of not resting till he had 
buried the felicity of his past, such as it was, under a 
great flat leaden slab. "Verite" is a plea for science, 



5 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

as science, to Zola, is all truth, the mention of any 
other kind being mere imbecility; and the simplifica- 
tion of the human picture to which his negations and 
exasperations have here conducted him was not, even 
when all had been said, credible in advance. The re- 
sult is amazing when we consider that the finer ob- 
servation is the supposed basis of all such work. It is 
not that even here the author has not a queer idealism 
of his own; this idealism is on the contrary so present 
as to show positively for the falsest of his simplifica- 
tions. In "Fecondite" it becomes grotesque, makes 
of the book the most muscular mistake of sense probably 
ever committed. Where was the judgment of which 
experience is supposed to be the guarantee when the 
perpetrator could persuade himself that the lesson he 
wished in these pages to convey could be made im- 
mediate and direct, chalked, with loud taps and a still 
louder commentary, the sexes and generations all con- 
voked, on the blackboard of the "family sentiment ?" 

I have mentioned, however, all this time but one of 
his categories. The second consists of such things as 
"La Fortune des Rougon" and "La Curee," as "Eu- 
gene Rougon" and even "Nana," as "Pot-Bouille," as 
"L'CEuvre" and "La Joie de Vivre." These volumes 
may rank as social pictures in the narrowest sense, 
studies, comprehensively speaking, of the manners, the 
morals, the miseries — for it mainly comes to that — of 
a bourgeoisie grossly materialised. They deal with the 
life of individuals in the liberal professions and with 
that of political and social adventures, and offer the 
personal character and career, more or less detached, 
as the centre of interest. "La Curee" is an evocation, 
violent and "romantic," of the extravagant appetites, 



fiMILE ZOLA 51 

the fever of the senses, supposedly fostered, for its 
ruin, by the hapless second Empire, upon which general 
ills and turpitudes at large were at one time so freely 
and conveniently fathered. "Eugene Rougon" carries 
out this view in the high colour of a political portrait, 
not other than scandalous, for which one of the minis- 
terial dmes damnees of Napoleon III., M. Rouher, is 
reputed, I know not how justly, to have sat. "Nana," 
attaching itself by a hundred strings to a prearranged 
table of kinships, heredities, transmissions, is the vast 
crowded epos of the daughter of the people filled with 
poisoned blood and sacrificed as well as sacrificing on 
the altar of luxury and lust; the panorama of such a 
"progress" as Hogarth would more definitely have 
named — the progress across the high plateau of 
"pleasure" and down the facile descent on the other 
side. "Nana" is truly a monument to Zola's patience; 
the subject being so ungrateful, so formidably spe- 
cial, that the multiplication of illustrative detail, the 
plunge into pestilent depths, represents a kind of tech- 
nical intrepidity. 

There are other plunges, into different sorts of dark- 
ness; of which the esthetic, even the scientific, even the 
ironic motive fairly escapes us — explorations of stag- 
nant pools like that of "La Joie de Vivre," as to which, 
granting the nature of the curiosity and the substance 
laboured in, the patience is again prodigious, but 
which make us wonder what pearl of philosophy, of 
suggestion or just of homely recognition, the general 
picture, as of rats dying in a hole, has to offer. Our 
various senses, sight, smell, sound, touch, are, as with 
Zola always, more or less convinced; but when the 
particular effect upon each of these is added to the 



: 



52 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

effect upon the others the mind still remains bewik 
deredly unconscious of any use for the total. I am not 
sure indeed that the case is in this respect better with 
the productions of the third order — "La Faute de 
l'Abbe Mouret," "Une Page d'Amour," "Le Reve,' 
"Le Docteur Pascal" — in which the appeal is more 
directly, is in fact quite earnestly, to the moral vision; 
so much, on such ground, was to depend precisely on 
those discriminations in which the writer is least at 
home. The volumes whose names I have just quoted 
are his express tribute to the "ideal," to the select 
and the charming — fair fruits of invention intended to 
remove from the mouth so far as possible the bitter- 
ness of the ugly things in which so much of the rest 
of his work had been condemned to consist. The sub- 
jects in question then are "idyllic" and the treatment 
poetic, concerned essentially to please on the largest 
lines and involving at every turn that salutary need. 
They are matters of conscious delicacy, and nothing 
might interest us more than to see what, in the shock 
of the potent forces enlisted, becomes of this shy ele- 
ment. Nothing might interest us more, literally, and 
might positively affect us more, even very nearly to 
tears, though indeed sometimes also to smiles, than to 
see the constructor of Les Rougon-Macquart trying, 
"for all he is worth," to be fine with fineness, finely 
tender, finely true — trying to be, as it is called, dis- 
tinguished — in face of constitutional hindrance. 

The effort is admirably honest, the tug at his subject 
splendidly strong; but the consequences remain of the 
strangest, and we get the impression that — as repre- 
senting discriminations unattainable — they are some- 
how the price he paid. "Le Docteur Pascal," for 



fiMILE ZOLA 53 

instance, which winds up the long chronicle on the 
romantic note, on the note of invoked beauty, in order 
to sweeten, as it were, the total draught — "Le Docteur 
Pascal/' treating of the erotic ardour entertained for 
each other by an uncle and his niece, leaves us amazed 
at such a conception of beauty, such an application of 
romance, such an estimate of sweetness, a sacrifice to 
poetry and passion so little in order. Of course, we 
definitely remind ourselves, the whole long chronicle 
is explicitly a scheme, solidly set up and intricately 
worked out, lighted, according to the author's preten- 
sion, by "science," high, dry and clear, and with each 
part involved and necessitated in all the other parts, 
each block of the edifice, each "morceau de vie," 
physiologically determined by previous combinations. 
"How can I help it," we hear the builder of the pyra- 
mid ask, "if experience (by which alone I proceed) 
shows me certain plain results — if, holding up the torch 
of my famous 'experimental method,' I find it stare me 
in the face that the union of certain types, the conflux 
of certain strains of blood, the intermarriage, in a 
word, of certain families, produces nervous conditions, 
conditions temperamental, psychical and pathological, 
in which nieces have to fall in love with uncles and 
uncles with nieces ? Observation and imagination, 
for any picture of life," he as audibly adds, "know no 
light but science, and are false to all intellectual de- 
cency, false to their own honour, when they fear it, 
dodge it, darken it. To pretend to any other guide 
or law is mere base humbug." 

That is very well, and the value, in a hundred ways, 
of a mass of production conceived in such a spirit can 
never (when robust execution has followed) be small. 



54 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

But the formula really sees us no further. It offers a 
definition which is no definition. "Science" is soon 
said — the whole thing depends on the ground so 
covered. Science accepts surely all our consciousness 
of life; even, rather, the latter closes maternally round 
it — so that, becoming thus a force within us, not a 
force outside, it exists, it illuminates only as we apply 
it. We do emphatically apply it in art. But Zola 
would apparently hold that it much more applies us. 
On the showing of many of his volumes then it makes 
but a dim use of us, and this we should still consider 
the case even were we sure that the article offered us 
in the majestic name is absolutely at one with its own 
pretension. This confidence we can on too many 
grounds never have. The matter is one of apprecia- 
tion, and when an artist answers for science who 
answers for the artist — who at the least answers for 
art ? Thus it is with the mistakes that affect us, I 
say, as Zola's penalties. We are reminded by them 
that the game of art has, as the phrase is, to be played. 
It may not with any sure felicity for the result be both 
taken and left. If you insist on the common you must 
submit to the common; if you discriminate, on the 
contrary, you must, however invidious your discrimina- 
tions may be called, trust to them to see you through. 

To the common then Zola, often with splendid re- 
sults, inordinately sacrifices, and this fact of its over- 
whelming him is what I have called his paying for it. 
In "L'Assommoir," in "Germinal," in "La Debacle," 
productions in which he must most survive, the sac- 
rifice is ordered and fruitful, for the subject and 
the treatment harmonise and work together. He de- 
scribes what he best feels, and feels it more and more 



fiMILE ZOLA 55 

as it naturally comes to him — quite, if I may allow 
myself the image, as we zoologically see some mighty 
animal, a beast of a corrugated hide and a portentous 
snout, soaking with joy in the warm ooze of an African 
riverside. In these cases everything matches, and 
"science," we may be permitted to believe, has had 
little hand in the business. The author's perceptions 
go straight, and the subject, grateful and responsive, 
gives itself wholly up. It is no longer a case of an un- 
certain smoky torch, but of a personal vision, the 
vision of genius, springing from an inward source. Of 
this genius "L'Assommoir" is the most extraordinary 
record. It contains, with the two companions I have 
given it, all the best of Zola, and the three books to- 
gether are solid ground — or would be could I now so 
take them — for a study of the particulars of his power. 
His strongest marks and features abound in them; 
"L'Assommoir" above all is (not least in respect to 
its bold free linguistic reach, already glanced at) com- 
pletely genial, while his misadventures, his unequipped 
and delusive pursuit of the life of the spirit and the 
tone of culture, are almost completely absent. 

It is a singular sight enough this of a producer of il- 
lusions whose interest for us is so independent of our 
pleasure or at least of our complacency — who touches 
us deeply even while he most "puts us off," who makes 
us care for his ugliness and yet himself at the same 
time pitilessly (pitilessly, that is, for us) makes a mock 
of it, who fills us with a sense of the rich which is none 
the less never the rare. Gervaise, the most immedi- 
ately "felt," I cannot but think, of all his characters, 
is a lame washerwoman, loose and gluttonous, without 
will, without any principle of cohesion, the sport of 



56 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

every wind that assaults her exposed life, and who, 
rolling from one gross mistake to another, finds her 
end in misery, drink and despair. But her career, as 
presented, has fairly the largeness that, throughout the 
chronicle, we feel as epic, and the intensity of her 
creator's vision of it and of the dense sordid life hanging 
about it is one of the great things the modern novel 
has been able to do. It has done nothing more com- 
pletely constitutive and of a tone so rich and full and 
sustained. The tone of "L'Assommoir" is, for mere 
"keeping up," unsurpassable, a vast deep steady tide 
on which every object represented is triumphantly 
borne. It never shrinks nor flows thin, and nothing 
for an instant drops, dips or catches; the high-water 
mark of sincerity, of the genial, as I have called it, is 
unfailingly kept. 

For the artist in the same general "line" such a pro- 
duction has an interest almost inexpressible, a mystery 
as to origin and growth over which he fondly but rather 
vainly bends. How after all does it so get itself done ? 
— the "done" being admirably the sign and crown of 
it. The light of the richer mind has been elsewhere, 
as I have sufficiently hinted, frequent enough, but 
nothing truly in all fiction was ever built so strong or 
made so dense as here. Needless to say there are a 
thousand things with more charm in their truth, with 
more beguilement of every sort, more prettiness of 
pathos, more innocence of drollery, for the spectator's 
sense of truth. But I doubt if there has ever been a 
more totally represented world, anything more founded 
and established, more provided for all round, more 
organised and carried on. It is a world practically 
workable, with every part as functional as every other, 



EMILE ZOLA 57 

and with the parts all chosen for direct mutual aid. 
Let it not be said either that the equal constitution 
of parts makes for repletion or excess; the air circulates 
and the subject blooms; deadness comes in these mat- 
ters only when the right parts are absent and there 
is vain beating of the air in their place — the refuge of 
the fumbler incapable of the thing "done" at all. 

The mystery I speak of, for the reader who reflects 
as he goes, is the wonder of the scale and energy of 
Zola's assimilations. This wonder besets us above 
all throughout the three books I have placed first. 
How, all sedentary and "scientific," did he get so 
near ? By what art, inscrutable, immeasurable, in- 
defatigable, did he arrange to make of his documents, 
in these connections, a use so vivified ? Say he was 
"near" the subject of "L'Assommoir" in imagina- 
tion, in more or less familiar impression, in tempera- 
ment and humour, he could not after all have been 
near it in personal experience, and the copious per- 
sonalism of the picture, not to say its frank animalism, 
yet remains its note and its strength. When the note 
had been struck in a thousand forms we had, by mul- 
tiplication, as a kind of cumulative consequence, the 
finished and rounded book; just as we had the same 
result by the same process in "Germinal." It is not 
of course that multiplication and accumulation, the 
extraordinary pair of legs on which he walks, are 
easily or directly consistent with his projecting him- 
self morally; this immense diffusion, with its appro- 
priation of everything it meets, affects us on the con- 
trary as perpetually delaying access to what we may 
call the private world, the world of the individual. 
Yet since the individual — for it so happens — is simple 



58 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

and shallow our author's dealings with him, as met and 
measured, maintain their resemblance to those of the 
lusty bee who succeeds in plumping for an instant, of a 
summer morning, into every flower-cup of the garden. 

Grant — and the generalisation may be emphatic — 
that the shallow and the simple are all the population 
of his richest and most crowded pictures, and that his 
"psychology," in a psychologic age, remains thereby 
comparatively coarse, grant this and we but get an 
other view of the miracle. We see enough of the 
superficial among novelists at large, assuredly, without 
deriving from it, as we derive from Zola at his best, 
the concomitant impression of the solid. It is in gen 
eral — I mean among the novelists at large — the im- 
pression of the cheap, which the author of Les Rougon 
Macquart, honest man, never faithless for a moment 
to his own stiff standard, manages to spare us even in 
the prolonged sandstorm of "Verite." The Common 
is another matter; it is one of the forms of the super- 
ficial — pervading and consecrating all things in such a 
book as "Germinal" — and it only adds to the number 
of our critical questions. How in the world is it made, 
this deplorable democratic malodorous Common, so 
strange and so interesting ? How is it taught to receive 
into its loins the stuff of the epic and still, in spite of 
that association with poetry, never depart from its 
nature ? It is in the great lusty game he plays with 
the shallow and the simple that Zola's mastery resides, 
and we see of course that when values are small it 
takes innumerable items and combinations to make up 
the sum. In "L'Assommoir" and in "Germinal," to 
some extent even in "La Debacle," the values are all, 
morally, personally, of the lowest — the highest is poor 



fiMILE ZOLA 59 

Gervaise herself, richly human in her generosities and 
follies — yet each is as distinct as a brass-headed nail. 

What we come back to accordingly is the unprece- 
dented case of such a combination of parts. Painters, 
of great schools, often of great talent, have responded 
liberally on canvas to the appeal of ugly things, of 
Spanish beggars, squalid and dusty-footed, of mar- 
tyred saints or other convulsed sufferers, tortured and 
bleeding, of boors and louts soaking a Dutch proboscis 
in perpetual beer; but we had never before had to 
reckon with so literary a treatment of the mean and 
vulgar. When we others of the Anglo-Saxon race are 
vulgar we are, handsomely and with the best con- 
science in the world, vulgar all through, too vulgar to 
be in any degree literary, and too much so therefore 
to be critically reckoned with at all. The French are 
different — they separate their sympathies, multiply 
their possibilities, observe their shades, remain more 
or less outside of their worst disasters. They mostly 
contrive to get the idea, in however dead a faint, down 
into the lifeboat. They may lose sight of the stars, 
but they save in some such fashion as that their in- 
tellectual souls. Zola's own reply to all puzzlements 
would have been, at any rate, I take it, a straight sum- 
mary of his inveterate professional habits. "It is all 
very simple — I produce, roughly speaking, a volume a 
year, and of this time some five months go to prepara- 
tion, to special study. In the other months, with all 
my cadres established, I write the book. And I can 
hardly say which part of the job is stiffest." 

The story was not more wonderful for him than 
that, nor the job more complex; which is why we must 



60 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

say of his whole process and its results that they con- 
stitute together perhaps the most extraordinary imita- 
tion of observation that we possess. Balzac appealed 
to "science" and proceeded by her aid; Balzac had 
cadres enough and a tabulated world, rubrics, relation- 
ships and genealogies; but Balzac affects us in spite of 
everything as personally overtaken by life, as fairly 
hunted and run to earth by it. He strikes us as strug- 
gling and all but submerged, as beating over the scene 
such a pair of wings as were not soon again to be wielded 
by any visitor of his general air and as had not at all 
events attached themselves to Zola's rounded shoulders. 
His bequest is in consequence immeasurably more in- 
teresting, yet who shall declare that his adventure was 
in its greatness more successful ? Zola "pulled it off," 
as we say, supremely, in that he never but once found 
himself obliged to quit, to our vision, his magnificent 
treadmill of the pigeonholed and documented — the 
region we may qualify as that of experience by imi- 
tation. His splendid economy saw him through, he 
laboured to the end within sight of his notes and his 
charts. 

The extraordinary thing, however, is that on the 
single occasion when, publicly — as his whole manifes- 
tation was public — life did swoop down on him, the 
effect of the visitation was quite perversely other than 
might have been looked for. His courage in the 
Dreyfus connection testified admirably to his ability 
to live for himself and out of the order of his volumes 
— little indeed as living at all might have seemed a 
question for one exposed, when his crisis was at its 
height and he was found guilty of "insulting" the 
powers that were, to be literally torn to pieces in the 






fiMILE ZOLA 61 

precincts of the Palace of Justice. Our point is that 
nothing was ever so odd as that these great moments 
should appear to have been wasted, when all was said, 
for his creative intelligence. "Verite," as I have in- 
timated, the production in which they might most 
have been reflected, is a production unrenewed and 
unrefreshed by them, spreads before us as somehow 
flatter and greyer, not richer and more relieved, by 
reason of them. They really arrived, I surmise, too 
late in the day; the imagination they might have vivi- 
fied was already fatigued and spent. 

I must not moreover appear to say that the power 
to evoke and present has not even on the dead level of 
"Verite" its occasional minor revenges. There are 
passages, whole pages, of the old full-bodied sort, 
pictures that elsewhere in the series would in all likeli- 
hood have seemed abundantly convincing. Their mis- 
fortune is to have been discounted by our intensified, 
our finally fatal sense of the procede. Quarrelling with 
all conventions, defiant of them in general, Zola was 
yet inevitably to set up his own group of them — as, 
for that matter, without a sufficient collection, without 
their aid in simplifying and making possible, how could 
he ever have seen his big ship into port ? Art wel- 
comes them, feeds upon them always; no sort of form 
is practicable without them. It is only a question of 
what particular ones we use — to wage war on certain 
others and to arrive at particular forms. The con- 
vention of the blameless being, the thoroughly "scien- 
tific" creature possessed impeccably of all truth and 
serving as the mouthpiece of it and of the author's 
highest complacencies, this character is for instance 
a convention inveterate and indispensable, without 



62 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

whom the "sympathetic" side of the work could never 
have been achieved. Marc in "Verite," Pierre Fro- 
ment in "Lourdes" and in "Rome," the wondrous 
representatives of the principle of reproduction in 
"Fecondite," the exemplary painter of "L'CEuvre," 
sublime in his modernity and paternity, the patient 
Jean Macquart of "La Debacle," whose patience is as 
guaranteed as the exactitude of a well-made watch, 
the supremely enlightened Docteur Pascal even, as I 
recall him, all amorous nepotism but all virtue too and 
all beauty of life — such figures show us the reasonable 
and the good not merely in the white light of the old 
George Sand novel and its improved moralities, but 
almost in that of our childhood's nursery and school- 
room, that of the moral tale of Miss Edgeworth and 
Mr. Thomas Day. 

Yet let not these restrictions be my last word. I 
had intended, under the effect of a reperusal of "La 
Debacle," "Germinal" and "L'Assommoir," to make 
no discriminations that should not be in our hero's 
favour. The long-drawn incident of the marriage of 
Gervaise and Cadet-Cassis and that of the Homeric 
birthday feast later on in the laundress's workshop, 
each treated from beginning to end and in every item 
of their coarse comedy and humanity, still show the 
unprecedented breadth by which they originally made 
us stare, still abound in the particular kind and degree 
of vividness that helped them, when they appeared, 
to mark a date in the portrayal of manners. Nothing 
had then been so sustained and at every moment of 
its grotesque and pitiful existence lived into as the 
nuptial day of the Coupeau pair in especial, their 
fantastic processional pilgrimage through the streets 



fiMILE ZOLA 63 

of Paris in the rain, their bedraggled exploration of the 
halls of the Louvre museum, lost as in the labyrinth 
of Crete, and their arrival at last, ravenous and ex- 
asperated, at the guinguette where they sup at so much 
a head, each paying, and where we sit down with 
them in the grease and the perspiration and succumb, 
half in sympathy, half in shame, to their monstrous 
pleasantries, acerbities and miseries. I have said 
enough of the mechanical in Zola; here in truth is, 
given the elements, almost insupportably the sense of 
life. That effect is equally in the historic chapter of 
the strike of the miners in "Germinal," another of 
those illustrative episodes, viewed as great passages 
to be "rendered," for which our author established 
altogether a new measure and standard of handling, a 
new energy and veracity, something since which the 
old trivialities and poverties of treatment of such 
aspects have become incompatible, for the novelist, 
with either rudimentary intelligence or rudimentary 
self-respect. 

As for "La Debacle," finally, it takes its place with 
Tolstoi's very much more universal but very much less 
composed and condensed epic as an incomparably 
human picture of war. I have been re-reading it, I 
confess, with a certain timidity, the dread of perhaps 
impairing the deep impression received at the time of 
its appearance. I recall the effect it then produced 
on me as a really luxurious act of submission. It was 
early in the summer; I was in an old Italian town; the 
heat was oppressive, and one could but recline, in the 
lightest garments, in a great dim room and give one's 
self up. I like to think of the conditions and the 
emotion, which melt for me together into the memory 



64 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

I fear to imperil. I remember that in the glow of my 
admiration there was not a reserve I had ever made 
that I was not ready to take back. As an application 
of the author's system and his supreme faculty, as a 
triumph of what these things could do for him, how 
could such a performance be surpassed ? The long, 
complex, horrific, pathetic battle, embraced, mastered, 
with every crash of its squadrons, every pulse of its 
thunder and blood resolved for us, by reflection, by 
communication from two of the humblest and ob- 
scurest of the military units, into immediate vision and 
contact, into deep human thrills of terror and pity — 
this bristling centre of the book was such a piece of 
"doing" (to come back to our word) as could only 
shut our mouths. That doubtless is why a generous 
critic, nursing the sensation, may desire to drop for a 
farewell no term into the other scale. That our au- 
thor was clearly great at congruous subjects — this may 
well be our conclusion. If the others, subjects of the 
private and intimate order, gave him more or less 
inevitably "away," they yet left him the great distinc- 
tion that the more he could be promiscuous and col- 
lective, the more even he could (to repeat my imputa- 
tion) illustrate our large natural allowance of health, 
heartiness and grossness, the more he could strike us 
as penetrating and true. It was a distinction not easy 
to win and that his name is not likely soon to lose. 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 

The first thing I find to-day and on my very threshold J 
to say about Gustave Flaubert is that he has been re- 
ported on by M. fimile Faguet in the series of Les 
Grands ficrivains Francais with such lucidity as may 
almost be taken to warn off a later critic. I desire to 
pay at the outset my tribute to M. Faguet's exhaus- 
tive study, which is really in its kind a model and a 
monument. Never can a critic have got closer to a 
subject of this order; never can the results of the ap- 
proach have been more copious or more interesting; 
never in short can the master of a complex art have 
been more mastered in his turn, nor his art more pene- 
trated, by the application of an earnest curiosity. 
That remark I have it at heart to make, so pre-emi- 
nently has the little volume I refer to not left the 
subject where it found it. It abounds in contributive 
light, and yet, I feel on reflection that it scarce wholly 
dazzles another contributor away. One reason of this 
is that, though I enter into everything M. Faguet has 
said, there are things — things perhaps especially of 
the province of the artist, the fellow-craftsman of 
Flaubert — that I am conscious of his not having said; 
another is that inevitably there are particular possibil- 
ities of reaction in our English-speaking consciousness 
that hold up a light of their own. Therefore I venture 

1 On the occasion of these prefatory remarks to a translation of "Madame 
Bovary," appearing in A Century of French Romance, under the auspices 
of Mr. Edmund Gosse and Mr. William Heinemann, in 1902. 

65 



66 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

to follow even on a field so laboured, only paying this 
toll to the latest and best work because the author has 
made it impossible to do less. 

Flaubert's life is so almost exclusively the story of 
his literary application that to speak of his five or six 
fictions is pretty well to account for it all. He died 
in 1880 after a career of fifty-nine years singularly 
little marked by changes of scene, of fortune, of at- 
titude, of occupation, of character, and above all, as 
may be said, of mind. He would be interesting to the 
race of novelists if only because, quite apart from the 
value of his work, he so personally gives us the example 
and the image, so presents the intellectual case. He 
was born a novelist, grew up, lived, died a novelist, 
breathing, feeling, thinking, speaking, performing 
every operation of life, only as that votary; and this 
though his production was to be small in amount and 
though it constituted all his diligence. It was not 
indeed perhaps primarily so much that he was born 
and lived a novelist as that he was born and lived 
literary, and that to be literary represented for him 
an almost overwhelming situation. No life was long 
enough, no courage great enough, no fortune kind 
enough to support a man undei the burden of this 
character when once such a doom had been laid on 
him. His case was a doom because he felt of his voca- 
tion almost nothing but the difficulty. He had many 
strange sides, but this was the strangest, that if we 
argued from his difficulty to his work, the difficulty 
being registered for us in his letters and elsewhere, we 
should expect from the result but the smallest things. 
We should be prepared to find in it well-nigh a complete 
absence of the signs of a gift. We should regret that 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 67 

the unhappy man had not addressed himself to some- 
thing he might have found at least comparatively easy. 
We should singularly miss the consecration sup- 
posedly given to a work of art by its having been con- 
ceived in joy. That is Flaubert's remarkable, his so 
far as I know unmatched distinction, that he has left 
works of an extraordinary art even the conception of 
which failed to help him to think in serenity. The 
chapter of execution, from the moment execution gets 
really into the shafts, is of course always and every- 
where a troubled one — about which moreover too much 
has of late been written; but we frequently find Flau- 
bert cursing his subjects themselves, wishing he had 
not chosen them, holding himself up to derision for 
having done so, and hating them in the very act of 
sitting down to them. He cared immensely for the 
medium, the task and the triumph involved, but was 
himself the last to be able to say why. He is sustained 
only by the rage and the habit of effort; the mere love 
of letters, let alone the love of life, appears at an early 
age to have deserted him. Certain passages in his cor- 
respondence make us even wonder if it be not hate 
that sustains him most. So, successively, his several 
supremely finished and crowned compositions came 
into the world, and we may feel sure that none others 
of the kind, none that were to have an equal fortune, 
had sprung from such adversity. 

I insist upon this because his at once excited and 
baffled passion gives the key of his life and determines 
its outline. I must speak of him at least as I feel him 
and as in his very latest years I had the fortune occa- 
sionally to see him. I said just now, practically, that he 
is for many of our tribe at large the novelist, intent and 



68 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

typical, and so, gathered together and foreshortened, 
simplified and fixed, the lapse of time seems to show 
him. It has made him in his prolonged posture ex- 
traordinarily objective, made him even resemble one 
of his own productions, constituted him as a subject, 
determined him as a figure; the limit of his range, and 
above all of his reach, is after this fashion, no doubt, 
sufficiently indicated, and yet perhaps in the event 
without injury to his name. If our consideration of 
him cultivates a certain tenderness on the double 
ground that he suffered supremely in the cause and 
that there is endlessly much to be learned from him, 
we remember at the same time that, indirectly, the 
world at large possesses him not less than the confrere. 
He has fed and fertilised, has filtered through others, 
and so arrived at contact with that public from whom 
it was his theory that he was separated by a deep and 
impassable trench, the labour of his own spade. He is 
none the less more interesting, I repeat, as a failure 
however qualified than as a success however explained, 
and it is as so viewed that the unity of his career 
attaches and admonishes. Save in some degree by a 
condition of health (a liability to epileptic fits at 
times frequent, but never so frequent as to have been 
generally suspected,) he was not outwardly hampered 
as the tribe of men of letters goes — an anxious brother- 
hood at the best; yet the fewest possible things appear 
to have ever succeeded in happening to him. The 
only son of an eminent provincial physician, he in- 
herited a modest ease and no other incumbrance than, 
as was the case for Balzac, an over-attentive, an im- 
portunate mother; but freedom spoke to him from 
behind a veil, and when we have mentioned the few ap- 
parent facts of experience that make up his landmarks 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 69 

over and beyond his interspaced publications we shall 
have completed his biography. Tall, strong, striking, 
he caused his friends to admire in him the elder, the 
florid Norman type, and he seems himself, as a man of 
imagination, to have found some transmission of race 
in his stature and presence, his light-coloured salient 
eyes and long tawny moustache. 

The central event of his life was his journey to the 
East in 1849 with M. Maxime Du Camp, of which the 
latter has left in his "Impressions Litteraires" a singu- 
larly interesting and, as we may perhaps say, slightly 
treacherous report, and which prepared for Flaubert 
a state of nostalgia that was not only never to leave 
him, but that was to work in him as a motive. He 
had during that year, and just in sufficient quantity, 
his revelation, the particular appropriate disclosure to 
which the gods at some moment treat the artist unless 
they happen too perversely to conspire against him: 
he tasted of the knowledge by which he was subse- 
quently to measure everything, appeal from every- 
thing, find everything flat. Never probably was an 
impression so assimilated, so positively transmuted to 
a function; he lived on it to the end and we may say 
that in "Salammbo" and "La Tentation de Saint- 
Antoine ,, he almost died of it. He made afterwards 
no other journey of the least importance save a dis- 
gusted excursion to the Rigi-Kaltbad shortly before his 
death. The Franco-German War was of course to 
him for the time as the valley of the shadow itself; 
but this was an ordeal, unlike most of his other ordeals, 
shared after all with millions. He never married — he 
declared, toward the end, to the most comprehending 
of his confidants, that he had been from the first 



70 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

"afraid of life"; and the friendliest element of his 
later time was, we judge, that admirable comfortable 
commerce, in her fullest maturity, with Madame 
George Sand, the confidant I just referred to; which 
has been preserved for us in the published correspon- 
dence of each. He had in Ivan Turgenieff a friend al- 
most as valued; he spent each year a few months in 
Paris, where (to mention everything) he had his 
natural place, so far as he cared to take it, at the small 
literary court of the Princess Mathilde; and, lastly, he 
lost toward the close of his life, by no fault of his own, 
a considerable part of his modest fortune. It is, how- 
ever, in the long security, the almost unbroken soli- 
tude of Croisset, near Rouen, that he mainly figures 
for us, gouging out his successive books in the wide 
old room, of many windows, that, with an intervening 
terrace, overlooked the broad Seine and the passing 
boats. This was virtually a monastic cell, closed to 
echoes and accidents; with its stillness for long periods 
scarce broken save by the creak of the towing-chain 
of the tugs across the water. When I have added that 
his published letters offer a view, not very refreshing, 
of his youthful entanglement with Madame Louise 
Colet — whom we name because, apparently not a 
shrinking person, she long ago practically named her- 
self — I shall have catalogued his personal vicissitudes. 
And I may add further that the connection with Ma- 
dame Colet, such as it was, rears its head for us in 
something like a desert of immunity from such compli- 
cations. 

His complications were of 'the spirit, of the literary 
vision, and though he was thoroughly profane he was 
yet essentially anchoretic. I perhaps miss a point, 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 71 

however, in not finally subjoining that he was liberally 
accessible to his friends during the months he regularly 
spent in Paris. Sensitive, passionate, perverse, not 
less than immediately sociable — for if he detested his 
collective contemporaries this dropped, thanks to his 
humanising shyness, before the individual encounter — 
he was in particular and superexcellently not banal, 
and he attached men perhaps more than women, in- 
spiring a marked, a by no means colourless shade of 
respect; a respect not founded, as the air of it is apt to 
be, on the vague presumption, but addressed almost in 
especial to his disparities and oddities and thereby, 
no doubt, none too different from affection. His friends 
at all events were a rich and eager cenacle, among whom 
he was on occasion, by his picturesque personality, a 
natural and overtopping centre; partly perhaps be- 
cause he was so much and so familiarly at home. He 
wore, up to any hour of the afternoon, that long, col- 
loquial dressing-gown, with trousers to match, which 
one has always associated with literature in France — 
the uniform really of freedom of talk. Freedom of 
talk abounded by his winter fire, for the cenacle was 
made up almost wholly of the more finely distinguished 
among his contemporaries; of philosophers, men of 
letters and men of affairs belonging to his own genera- 
tion and the next. He had at the time I have in mind 
a small perch, far aloft, at the distant, the then almost 
suburban, end of the Faubourg Saint-Honore, where on 
Sunday afternoons, at the very top of an endless flight 
of stairs, were to be encountered in a cloud of conversa- 
tion and smoke most of the novelists of the general 
Balzac tradition. Others of a different birth and com- 
plexion were markedly not of the number, were not 
even conceivable as present; none of those, unless I 



72 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

misremember, whose fictions were at that time "serial- 
ised" in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In spite of 
Renan and Taine and two or three more, the contrib- 
utor to the Revue would indeed at no time have found 
in the circle in question his foot on his native heath. 
One could recall if one would two or three vivid al- 
lusions to him, not of the most quotable, on the lips 
of the most famous of "naturalists" — allusions to him 
as represented for instance by M. Victor Cherbuliez 
and M. Octave Feuillet. The author of these pages 
recalls a concise qualification of this last of his fellows 
on the lips of Emile Zola, which that absorbed auditor 
had too directly, too rashly asked for; but which is alas 
not reproducible here. There was little else but the 
talk, which had extreme intensity and variety; almost 
nothing, as I remember, but a painted and gilded idol, 
of considerable size, a relic and a memento, on the 
chimney-piece. Flaubert was huge and diffident, but 
florid too and resonant, and my main remembrance is 
of a conception of courtesy in him, an accessibility to 
the human relation, that only wanted to be sure of 
the way taken or to take. The uncertainties of the 
French for the determination of intercourse have often 
struck me as quite matching the sharpness of their 
certainties, as we for the most part feel these latter, 
which sometimes in fact throw the indeterminate into 
almost touching relief. I have thought of them at 
such times as the people in the world one may have 
to go more of the way to meet than to meet any other, 
and this, as it were, through their being seated and 
embedded, provided for at home, in a manner that 
is all their own and that has bred them to the positive 
preacceptance of interest on their behalf. We at least 
of the Anglo-American race, more abroad in the world, 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 73 

perching everywhere, so far as grounds of intercourse 
are concerned, more vaguely and superficially, as well 
as less intelligently, are the more ready by that fact 
with inexpensive accommodations, rather conscious 
that these themselves forbear from the claim to fasci- 
nate, and advancing with the good nature that is the 
mantle of our obtuseness to any point whatever where 
entertainment may be offered us. My recollection is 
at any rate simplified by the fact of the presence al- 
most always, in the little high room of the Faubourg's 
end, of other persons and other voices. Flaubert's 
own voice is clearest to me from the uneffaced sense 
of a winter week-day afternoon when I found him by 
exception alone and when something led to his reading 
me aloud, in support of some judgment he had thrown 
ofF, a poem of Theophile Gautier's. He cited it as an 
example of verse intensely and distinctively French, 
and French in its melancholy, which neither Goethe 

1 nor Heine nor Leopardi, neither Pushkin nor Tenny- 
son nor, as he said, Byron, could at all have matched in 
kind. He converted me at the moment to this percep- 
tion, alike by the sense of the thing and by his large 
utterance of it; after which it is dreadful to have to 
confess not only that the poem was then new to me, 
but that, hunt as I will in every volume of its author, 

j I am never able to recover it. This is perhaps after all 
happy, causing Flaubert's own full tone, which was the 
note of the occasion, to linger the more unquenched. 
But for the rhyme in fact I could have believed him to 

i be spouting to me something strange and sonorous of 
his own. The thing really rare would have been to 
hear him do that — hear him gueuler, as he liked to 
call it. Verse, I felt, we had always with us, and almost 

1 any idiot of goodwill could give it a value. The value 



74 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

of so many a passage of "Salammbo" and of "L'Edu- 
cation" was on the other hand exactly such as gained 
when he allowed himself, as had by the legend ever 
been frequent dans I 'intimite, to " bellow " it to its 
fullest effect. 

One of the things that make him most exhibitional 
and most describable, so that if we had invented him 
as an illustration or a character we would exactly so 
have arranged him, is that he was formed intellectually 
of two quite distinct compartments, a sense of the real 
and a sense of the romantic, and that his production, 
for our present cognisance, thus neatly and vividly 
divides itself. The divisions are as marked as the 
sections on the back of a scarab, though their distinct- 
ness is undoubtedly but the final expression of much 
inward strife. M. Faguet indeed, who is admirable on 
this question of our author's duality, gives an account 
of the romanticism that found its way for him into the 
real and of the reality that found its way into the 
romantic; but he none the less strikes us as a curious 
splendid insect sustained on wings of a different colora- 
tion, the right a vivid red, say, and the left as frank a 
yellow. This duality has in its sharp operation placed 
"Madame Bovary" and "L'Education" on one side 
together and placed together on the other "Salammbo" 
and "La Tentation." " Bouvard et Pecuchet" it can 
scarce be spoken of, I think, as having placed anywhere 
or anyhow. If it was Flaubert's way to find his sub- 
ject impossible there was none he saw so much in that 
light as this last-named, but also none that he ap- 
pears to have held so important for that very reason 
to pursue to the bitter end. Posterity agrees with 
him about the impossibility, but rather takes upon 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 75 

itself to break with the rest of the logic. We may per- 
haps, however, for symmetry, let "Bouvard et Pecu- 
chet" figure as the tail — if scarabs ever have tails — of 
our analogous insect. Only in that case we should also 
append as the very tip the small volume of the "Trois 
Contes," preponderantly of the deepest imaginative 
hue. 

His imagination was great and splendid; in spite of 
which, strangely enough, his masterpiece is not his 
most imaginative work. "Madame Bovary," beyond 
question, holds that first place, and "Madame Bovary " 
is concerned w T ith the career of a country doctor's wife 
in a petty Norman town. The elements of the pic- 
ture are of the fewest, the situation of the heroine 
almost of the meanest, the material for interest, con- 
sidering the interest yielded, of the most unpromising; 
but these facts only throw into relief one of those in- 
calculable incidents that attend the proceedings of 
genius. "Madame Bovary" was doomed by circum- 
stances and causes — the freshness of comparative youth 
and good faith on the author's part being perhaps the 
chief — definitely to take its position, even though its 
subject was fundamentally a negation of the remote, 
the splendid and the strange, the stuff of his fondest and 
most cultivated dreams. It would have seemed very 
nearly to exclude the free play of the imagination, 
and the way this faculty on the author's part never- 
theless presides is one of those accidents, manoeuvres, 
inspirations, we hardly know what to call them, by 
which masterpieces grow. He of course knew more 01 
less what he was doing for his book in making Emma 
Bovary a victim of the imaginative habit, but he must 
have been far from designing or measuring the total 



76 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

effect which renders the work so general, so complete 
an expression of himself. His separate idiosyncrasies, 
his irritated sensibility to the life about him, with the 
power to catch it in the fact and hold it hard, and his 
hunger for style and history and poetry, for the rich 
and the rare, great reverberations, great adumbrations, 
are here represented together as they are not in his 
later writings. There is nothing of the near, of the 
directly observed, though there may be much of the 
directly perceived and the minutely detailed, either in 
"Salammbo" or in "Saint-Antoine," and little enough 
of the extravagance of illusion in that indefinable last 
word of restrained evocation and cold execution 
"L'Education Sentimentale." M. Faguet has of 
course excellently noted this — that the fortune and 
felicity of the book were assured by the stroke that 
made the central figure an embodiment of helpless 
romanticism. Flaubert himself but narrowly escaped 
being such an embodiment after all, and he is thus able 
to express the romantic mind with extraordinary 
truth. As to the rest of the matter he had the luck of 
having been in possession from the first, having begun 
so early to nurse and work up his plan that, familiar- 
ity and the native air, the native soil, aiding, he had 
finally made out to the last lurking shade the small 
sordid sunny dusty village picture, its emptiness con- 
stituted and peopled. It is in the background and the 
accessories that the real, the real of his theme, abides; 
and the romantic, the romantic of his theme, accord- 
ingly occupies the front. Emma Bovary's poor ad- 
ventures are a tragedy for the very reason that in a 
world unsuspecting, unassisting, unconsoling, she has 
herself to distil the rich and the rare. Ignorant, un- 
guided, undiverted, ridden by the very nature and 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 77 

mixture of her consciousness, she makes of the business 
an inordinate failure, a failure which in its turn makes 
for Flaubert the most pointed, the most told of anec- 
dotes. 

There are many things to say about ''Madame 
Bovary," but an old admirer of the book would be but 
half-hearted — so far as they represent reserves or 
puzzlements — were he not to note first of all the cir- 
cumstances by which it is most endeared to him. To 
remember it from far back is to have been present all 
along at a process of singular interest to a literary 
mind, a case indeed full of comfort and cheer. The 
finest of Flaubert's novels is to-day, on the French 
shelf of fiction, one of the first of the classics; it has at- 
tained that position, slowly but steadily, before our 
eyes; and we seem so to follow the evolution of the fate 
of a classic. We see how the thing takes place; which 
we rarely can, for we mostly miss either the beginning 
or the end, especially in the case of a consecration as 
complete as this. The consecrations of the past are 
too far behind and those of the future too far in front. 
That the production before us should have come in for 
the heavenly crown may be a fact to offer English and 
American readers a mystifying side; but it is exactly 
our ground and a part moreover of the total interest. 
The author of these remarks remembers, as with a 
sense of the way such things happen, that when a very 
young person in Paris he took up from the parental 
table the latest number of the periodical in which 
Flaubert's then duly unrecognised masterpiece was in 
course of publication. The moment is not historic, 
but it was to become in the light of history, as may be 
said, so unforgettable that every small feature of it 



78 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

yet again lives for him: it rests there like the backward 
end of the span. The cover of the old Revue de Paris 
was yellow, if I mistake not, like that of the new, and 
"Madame Bovary: Moeurs de Province," on the in- 
side of it, was already, on the spot, as a title, mysteri- 
ously arresting, inscrutably charged. I was ignorant 
of what had preceded and was not to know till much 
later what followed; but present to me still is the act 
of standing there before the fire, my back against the 
low beplushed and begarnished French chimney-piece 
and taking in what I might of that instalment, taking 
it in with so surprised an interest, and perhaps as well 
such a stir of faint foreknowledge, that the sunny little 
salon, the autumn day, the window ajar and the cheerful 
outside clatter of the Rue Montaigne are all now for 
me more or less in the story and the story more or less 
in them. The story, however, was at that moment 
having a difficult life; its fortune was all to make; its 
merit was so far from suspected that, as Maxime Du 
Camp — though verily with no excess of contrition — 
relates, its cloth of gold barely escaped the editorial 
shears. This, with much more, contributes for us to 
the course of things to come. The book, on its appear- 
ance as a volume, proved a shock to the high pro- 
priety of the guardians of public morals under the 
second Empire, and Flaubert was prosecuted as author 
of a work indecent to scandal. The prosecution in the 
event fell to the ground, but I should perhaps have 
mentioned this agitation as one of the very few, of 
any public order, in his short list. "Le Candidat" 
fell at the Vaudeville Theatre, several years later, with 
a violence indicated by its withdrawal after a perform- 
ance of but two nights, the first of these marked by a 
deafening uproar; only if the comedy was not to re- 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 79 

cover from this accident the misprised lustre of the 
novel was entirely to reassert itself. It is strange enough 
at present — so far have we travelled since then — that 
"Madame Bovary" should in so comparatively recent 
a past have been to that extent a cause of reprobation; 
and suggestive above all, in such connections, as to 
the large unconsciousness of superior minds. The de- 
sire of the superior mind of the day — that is the govern- 
mental, official, legal — to distinguish a book with such 
a destiny before it is a case conceivable, but concep- 
tion breaks down before its design of making the dis- 
tinction purely invidious. We can imagine its knowing 
so little, however face to face with the object, what it 
had got hold of; but for it to have been so urged on 
by a blind inward spring to publish to posterity the 
extent of its ignorance, that would have been beyond 
imagination, beyond everything but pity. 

And yet it is not after all that the place the book has 
taken is so overwhelmingly explained by its inherent 
dignity; for here comes in the curiosity of the matter. 
Here comes in especially its fund of admonition for 
alien readers. The dignity of its substance is the dig- 
nity of Madame Bovary herself as a vessel of experi- 
ence^ — a question as to which, unmistakably, I judge, 
we can only depart from the consensus of French 
critical opinion. M. Faguet for example commends 
the character of the heroine as one of the most living 
and discriminated figures of women in all literature, 
praises it as a field for the display of the romantic 
spirit that leaves nothing to be desired. Subject to an 
observation I shall presently make and that bears 
heavily in general, I think, on Flaubert as a painter 
of life, subject to this restriction he is right; which is a 



80 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

proof that a work of art may be markedly open to ob- 
jection and at the same time be rare in its kind, and 
that when it is perfect to this point nothing else par- 
ticularly matters. "Madame Bovary" has a perfec- 
tion that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand 
almost alone; it holds itself with such a supreme un- 
approachable assurance as both excites and defies 
judgment. For it deals not in the least, as to unap- 
p roach ability, with things exalted or refined; it only 
confers on its sufficiently vulgar elements of exhibition 
a final unsurpassable form. The form is in itself as 
interesting, as active, as much of the essence of the 
subject as the idea, and yet so close is its fit and so 
inseparable its life that we catch it at no moment on 
any errand of its own. That verily is to be interest- 
ing — all round; that is to be genuine and whole. The 
work is a classic because the thing, such as it is, is 
ideally done, and because it shows that in such doing 
eternal beauty may dwell. A pretty young woman 
who lives, socially and morally speaking, in a hole, and 
who is ignorant, foolish, flimsy, unhappy, takes a pair 
of lovers by whom she is successively deserted; in the 
midst of the bewilderment of which, giving up her 
husband and her child, letting everything go, she sinks 
deeper into duplicity, debt, despair, and arrives on the 
spot, on the small scene itself of her poor depravities, 
at a pitiful tragic end. In especial she does these things 
while remaining absorbed in romantic intention and 
vision, and she remains absorbed in romantic intention 
and vision while fairly rolling in the dust. That is the 
triumph of the book as the triumph stands, that Emma 
interests us by the nature of her consciousness and the 
play of her mind, thanks to the reality and beauty 
with which those sources are invested. It is not only 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 81 

that they represent her state; they are so true, so 
observed and felt, and especially so shown, that they 
represent the state, actual or potential, of all persons 
like her, persons romantically determined. Then her 
setting, the medium in which she struggles, becomes in 
its way as important, becomes eminent with the 
eminence of art; the tiny world in which she revolves, 
the contracted cage in which she flutters, is hung out 
in space for her, and her companions in captivity there 
are as true as herself. 

I have said enough to show what I mean by Flau- 
bert's having in this picture expressed something of 
his intimate self, given his heroine something of his 
own imagination: a point precisely that brings me back 
to the restriction at which I just now hinted, in which 
M. Faguet fails to indulge and yet which is immediate 
for the alien reader. Our complaint is that Emma 
Bovary, in spite of the nature of her consciousness 
and in spite of her reflecting so much that of her 
creator, is really too small an affair. This, critically 
speaking, is in view both of the value and the fortune 
of her history, a wonderful circumstance. She associ- 
ates herself with Frederic Moreau in "L'rtducation" 
to suggest for us a question that can be answered, I 
hold, only to Flaubert's detriment. Emma taken 
alone would possibly not so directly press it, but in 
her company the hero of our author's second study of 
the "real" drives it home. Why did Flaubert choose, 
as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, 
such inferior and in the case of Frederic such abject 
human specimens ? I insist only in respect to the latter, 
the perfection of Madame Bovary scarce leaving one 
much warrant for wishing anything other. Even here, 



82 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

however, the general scale and size of Emma, who is 
small even of her sort, should be a warning to hyperbole. 
If I say that in the matter of Frederic at all events the 
answer is inevitably detrimental I mean that it weighs 
heavily on our author's general credit. He wished in 
each case to make a picture of experience — middling 
experience, it is true — and of the world close to him; 
but if he imagined nothing better for his purpose than 
such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited re- 
flectors and registers, we are forced to believe it to 
have been by a defect of his mind. And that sign of 
weakness remains even if it be objected that the images 
in question were addressed to his purpose better than 
others would have been: the purpose itself then shows 
as inferior. "L'Education Sentimentale" is a strange, 
an indescribable work, about which there would be 
many more things to say than I have space for, and 
all of them of the deepest interest. It is moreover, to 
simplify my statement, very much less satisfying a 
thing, less pleasing whether in its unity or its variety, 
than its specific predecessor. But take it as we will, 
for a success or a failure — M. Faguet indeed ranks it, 
by the measure of its quantity of intention, a failure, 
and I on the whole agree with him — the personage 
offered us as bearing the weight of the drama, and in 
whom we are invited to that extent to interest ourselves, 
leaves us mainly wondering what our entertainer could 
have been thinking of. He takes Frederic Moreau on 
the threshold of life and conducts him to the extreme 
of maturity without apparently suspecting for a mo- 
ment either our wonder or our protest — "Why, why 
him?" Frederic is positively too poor for his part, 
too scant for his charge; and we feel with a kind of 
embarrassment, certainly with a kind of compassion, 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 83 

that it is somehow the business of a protagonist to 
prevent in his designer an excessive waste of faith. 
When I speak of the faith in Emma Bovary as pro- 
portionately wasted I reflect on M. Faguet's judgment 
that she is from the point of view of deep interest 
richly or at least roundedly representative. Repre- 
sentative of what ? he makes us ask even while grant- 
ing all the grounds of misery and tragedy involved. 
The plea for her is the plea made for all the figures 
that live without evaporation under the painter's hand 
— that they are not only particular persons but types 
of their kind, and as valid in one light as in the other. 
It is Emma's "kind" that I question for this respon- 
sibility, even if it be inquired of me why I then fail to 
question that of Charles Bovary, in its perfection, or 
that of the inimitable, the immortal Homais. If we 
express Emma's deficiency as the poverty of her con- 
sciousness for the typical function, it is certainly not, 
one must admit, that she is surpassed in this respect 
either by her platitudinous husband or by his friend 
the pretentious apothecary. The difference is none 
the less somehow in the fact that they are respectively 
studies but of their character and office, which function 
in each expresses adequately all they are. It may be, 
I concede, because Emma is the only woman in the 
book that she is taken by M. Faguet as, femininely 
typical, typical in the larger illustrative way, whereas 
the others pass with him for images specifically con- 
ditioned. Emma is this same for myself, I plead; she 
is conditioned to such an excess of the specific, and the 
specific in her case leaves out so many even of the 
commoner elements of conceivable life in a woman 
when we are invited to see that life as pathetic, as 
dramatic agitation, that we challenge both the author's 



84 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

and the critic's scale of importances. The book is a 
picture of the middling as much as they like, but does 
Emma attain even to that ? Hers is a narrow middling 
even for a little imaginative person whose "social" 
significance is small. It is greater on the whole than 
her capacity of consciousness, taking this all round; 
and so, in a word, we feel her less illustrational than she 
might have been not only if the world had offered her 
more points of contact, but if she had had more of 
these to give it. 

We meet Frederic first, we remain with him long, as 
a moyen, a provincial bourgeois of the mid-century, 
educated and not without fortune, thereby with free- 
dom, in whom the life of his day reflects itself. Yet 
the life of his day, on Flaubert's showing, hangs to- 
gether with the poverty of Frederic's own inward or 
for that matter outward life; so that, the whole thing 
being, for scale, intention and extension, a sort of epic 
of the usual (with the Revolution of 1848 introduced 
indeed as an episode,) it affects us as an epic without 
air, without wings to lift it; reminds us in fact more 
than anything else of a huge balloon, all of silk pieces 
strongly sewn together and patiently blown up, but 
that absolutely refuses to leave the ground. The dis- 
crimination I here make as against our author is, how- 
ever, the only one inevitable in a series of remarks so 
brief. What it really represents — and nothing could 
be more curious — is that Frederic enjoys his position 
not only without the aid of a single "sympathetic" 
character of consequence, but even without the aid of 
one with whom we can directly communicate. Can we 
communicate with the central personage ? or would we 
really if we could ? A hundred times no, and if he him 






GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 85 

self can communicate with the people shown us as 
surrounding him this only proves him of their kind. 
Flaubert on his "real" side was in truth an ironic 
painter, and ironic to a tune that makes his final ac- 
cepted state, his present literary dignity and " classic " 
peace, superficially anomalous. There is an explana- 
tion to which I shall immediately come; but I find my- 
self feeling for a moment longer in presence of "L'Edu- 
cation" how much more interesting a writer may be 
on occasion by the given failure than by the given 
success. Successes pure and simple disconnect and 
dismiss him; failures — though I admit they must be 
a bit qualified — keep him in touch and in relation. 
Thus it is that as the work of a "grand ecrivain" 
"L'fiducation," large, laboured, immensely "written," 
with beautiful passages and a general emptiness, with 
a kind of leak in its stored sadness, moreover, by which 
its moral dignity escapes — thus it is that Flaubert's 
ill-starred novel is a curiosity for a literary museum. 
Thus it is also that it suggests a hundred reflections, 
and suggests perhaps most of them directly to the in- 
tending labourer in the same field. If in short, as I 
have said, Flaubert is the novelist's novelist, this per- 
formance does more than any other toward making 
him so. 

I have to add in the same connection that I had not 
lost sight of Madame Arnoux, the main ornament of 
"L'Education," in pronouncing just above on its 
deficiency in the sympathetic. Madame Arnoux is 
exactly the author's one marked attempt, here or else- 
where, to represent beauty otherwise than for the 
senses, beauty of character and life; and what becomes 
of the attempt is a matter highly significant. M. 



86 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Faguet praises with justice his conception of the figure 
and of the relation, the relation that never bears fruit, 
that keeps Frederic adoring her, through hindrance and 
change, from the beginning of life to the end; that 
keeps her, by the same constraint, forever immacu- 
lately "good," from youth to age, though deeply 
moved and cruelly tempted and sorely tried. Her 
contacts with her adorer are not even frequent, in pro- 
portion to the field of time; her conditions of fortune, 
of association and occupation are almost sordid, and 
we see them with the march of the drama, such as it 
is, become more and more so; besides which — I again 
remember that M. Faguet excellently notes it — nothing 
in the nature of "parts" is attributed to her; not only 
is she not presented as clever, she is scarce invested 
with a character at all. Almost nothing that she says 
is repeated, almost nothing that she does is shown. 
She is an image none the less beautiful and vague, an 
image of passion cherished and abjured, renouncing 
all sustenance and yet persisting in life. Only she has 
for real distinction the extreme drawback that she is 
offered us quite preponderantly through Frederic's 
vision of her, that we see her practically in no other 
light. Now Flaubert unfortunately has not been able 
not so to discredit Frederic's vision in general, his 
vision of everyone and everything, and in particular of 
his own life, that it makes a medium good enough to 
convey adequately a noble impression. Madame Ar- 
noux is of course ever so much the best thing in his 
life — which is saying little; but his life is made up of 
such queer material that we find ourselves displeased 
at her being "in" it on whatever terms; all the more 
that she seems scarcely to affect, improve or deter- 
mine it. Her creator in short never had a more awk- 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 87 

ward idea than this attempt to give us the benefit of 
such a conception in such a way; and even though I 
have still something else to say about that I may as 
well speak of it at once as a mistake that gravely counts 
against him. It is but one of three, no doubt, in all his 
work; but I shall not, I trust, pass for extravagant if 
I call it the most indicative. What makes it so is its 
being the least superficial; the two others are, so to 
speak, intellectual, while this is somehow moral. It 
was a mistake, as I have already hinted, to propose 
to register in so mean a consciousness as that of such 
a hero so large and so mixed a quantity of life as " L'fidu- 
cation" clearly intends; and it was a mistake of the 
tragic sort that is a theme mainly for silence to have 
embarked on "Bouvard et Pecuchet" at all, not to 
have given it up sooner than be given up by it. But 
these were at the worst not wholly compromising 
blunders. What was compromising — and the great 
point is that it remained so, that nothing has an equal 
weight against it — is the unconsciousness of error in 
respect to the opportunity that would have counted 
as his finest. We feel not so much that Flaubert 
misses it, for that we could bear; but that he doesn't 
know he misses it is what stamps the blunder. We do 
not pretend to say how he might have shown us Ma- 
dame Arnoux better — that was his own affair. What 
is ours is that he really thought he was showing her 
as well as he could, or as she might be shown; at which 
we veil our face. For once that he had a conception 
quite apart, apart I mean from the array of his other 
conceptions and more delicate than any, he "went," 
as we say, and spoiled it. Let me add in all tender- 
ness, and to make up for possibly too much insistence, 
that it is the only stain on his shield; let me even con- 



88 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

fess that I should not wonder if, when all is said, it is 
a blemish no one has ever noticed. 

Perhaps no one has ever noticed either what was 
present to me just above as the partial makeweight 
there glanced at, the fact that in the midst of this 
general awkwardness, as I have called it, there is at 
the same time a danger so escaped as to entitle our 
author to full credit. I scarce know how to put it 
with little enough of the ungracious, but I think that 
even the true Flaubertist finds himself wondering a 
little that some flaw of taste, some small but unfor- 
tunate lapse by the way, should as a matter of fact 
not somehow or somewhere have waited on the dem- 
onstration of the platonic purity prevailing between 
this heroine and her hero — so far as we do find that 
image projected. It is alike difficult to indicate with- 
out offence or to ignore without unkindness a fond 
reader's apprehension here of a possibility of the wrong 
touch, the just perceptibly false note. I would not 
have staked my life on Flaubert's security of instinct 
in such a connection — as an absolutely fine and pre- 
determined security; and yet in the event that felicity 
has settled, there is not so much as the lightest wrong 
breath (speaking of the matter in this light of tact and 
taste) or the shade of a crooked stroke. One exclaims 
at the end of the question "Dear old Flaubert after 
all — !" and perhaps so risks seeming to patronise for 
fear of not making a point. The point made for what 
it is worth, at any rate, I am the more free to recover 
the benefit of what I mean by critical "tenderness" in 
our general connection — expressing in it as I do our 
general respect, and my own particular, for our au- 
thor's method and process and history, and my sense 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 89 

of the luxury of such a sentiment at such a vulgar 
literary time. It is a respect positive and settled and 
the thing that has most to do with consecrating for 
us that loyalty to him as the novelist of the novelist — 
unlike as it is even the best feeling inspired by any 
other member of the craft. He may stand for our 
operative conscience or our vicarious sacrifice; ani- 
mated by a sense of literary honour, attached to an 
ideal of perfection, incapable of lapsing in fine from 
a self-respect, that enable us to sit at ease, to sur- 
render to the age, to indulge in whatever comparative 
meannesses (and no meanness in art is so mean as the 
sneaking economic,) we may find most comfortable or 
profitable. May it not in truth be said that we prac- 
tise our industry, so many of us, at relatively little 
cost just because poor Flaubert, producing the most 
expensive fictions ever written, so handsomely paid for 
it ? It is as if this put it in our power to produce cheap 
and thereby sell dear; as if, so expressing it, literary 
honour being by his example effectively secure for the 
firm at large and the general concern, on its whole 
esthetic side, floated once for all, we find our individual 
attention free for literary and esthetic indifference. 
All the while we thus lavish our indifference the spirit 
of the author of "Madame Bovary," in the cross-light 
of the old room above the Seine, is trying to the last 
admiration for the thing itself. That production puts 
the matter into a nutshell: "Madame Bovary," sub- 
ject to whatever qualification, is absolutely the most 
literary of novels, so literary that it covers us with 
its mantle. It shows us once for all that there is no 
intrinsic call for a debasement of the type. The mantle 
I speak of is wrought with surpassing fineness, and we 
may always, under stress of whatever charge of illiter- 



9 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

acy, frivolity, vulgarity, flaunt it as the flag of the guild. 
Let us therefore frankly concede that to surround 
Flaubert with our consideration is the least return 
we can make for such a privilege. The consideration 
moreover is idle unless it be real, unless it be intel- 
ligent enough to measure his effort and his success. 
Of the effort as mere effort I have already spoken, of 
the desperate difficulty involved for him in making his 
form square with his conception; and I by no means 
attach general importance to these secrets of the work- 
shop, which are but as the contortions of the fastidious 
muse who is the servant of the oracle. They are really 
rather secrets of the kitchen and contortions of the 
priestess of that tripod — they are not an upstairs 
matter. It is of their specially distinctive importance 
I am now speaking, of the light shed on them by the 
results before us. 

They all represent the pursuit of a style, of the 
ideally right one for its relations, and would still be in- 
teresting if the style had not been achieved. " Madame 
Bovary," "Salammbo," "Saint-Antoine," "L'fiduca- 
tion" are so written and so composed (though the last- 
named in a minor degree) that the more we look at 
them the more we find in them, under this head, a beauty 
of intention and of effect; the more they figure in the 
too often dreary desert of fictional prose a class by 
themselves and a little living oasis. So far as that 
desert is of the complexion of our own English speech 
it supplies with remarkable rarity this particular source 
of refreshment. So strikingly is that the case, so scant 
for the most part any dream of a scheme of beauty in 
these connections, that a critic betrayed at artless mo- 
ments into a plea for composition may find himself as 






GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 91 

blankly met as if his plea were for trigonometry. He 
makes inevitably his reflections, which are numerous 
enough; one of them being that if we turn our back so 
squarely, so universally to this order of considerations 
it is because the novel is so preponderantly cultivated 
among us by women, in other words by a sex ever 
gracefully, comfortably, enviably unconscious (it would 
be too much to call them even suspicious,) of the 
requirements of form. The case is at any rate sharply 
enough made for us, or against us, by the circum- 
stance that women are held to have achieved on all 
our ground, in spite of this weakness and others, as 
great results as any. The judgment is undoubtedly 
founded: Jane Austen was instinctive and charming, 
and the other recognitions — even over the heads of 
the ladies, some of them, from Fielding to Pater — are 
obvious; without, however, in the least touching my 
contention. For signal examples of what composition, 
distribution, arrangement can do, of how they intensify 
the life of a work of art, we have to go elsewhere; and 
the value of Flaubert for us is that he admirably 
points the moral. This is the explanation of the 
"classic" fortune of "Madame Bovary" in especial, 
though I may add that also of Herodias and Saint- 
Julien l'Hospitalier in the "Trois Contes," as well as 
an aspect of these works endlessly suggestive. I spoke 
just now of the small field of the picture in the longest 
of them, the small capacity, as I called it, of the ves- 
sel; yet the way the thing is done not only triumphs 
over the question of value but in respect to it fairly 
misleads and confounds us. Where else shall we find 
in anything proportionately so small such an air of 
dignity of size ? Flaubert made things big — it was his 
way, his ambition and his necessity; and I say this 



92 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

while remembering that in "L' Education" (in propor- 
tion I mean again,) the effect has not been produced. 
The subject of "L'Education" is in spite of Frederic 
large, but an indefinable shrinkage has overtaken it 
in the execution. The exception so marked, however, 
is single; "Salammbo" and " Saint- Antoine" are both 
at once very "heavy" conceptions and very consist- 
ently and splendidly high applications of a manner. 

It is in this assured manner that the lesson sits aloft, 
that the spell for the critical reader resides; and if 
the conviction under which Flaubert labours is more 
and more grossly discredited among us his compact 
mass is but the greater. He regarded the work of art 
as existing but by its expression, and defied us to name 
any other measure of its life that is not a stultification. 
He held style to be accordingly an indefeasible part of 
it, and found beauty, interest and distinction as de- 
pendent on it for emergence as a letter committed to 
the post-office is dependent on an addressed envelope. 
Strange enough it may well appear to us to have to 
apologise for such notions as eccentric. There are 
persons who consider that style comes of itself — we see 
and hear at present, I think, enough of them; and to 
whom he would doubtless have remarked that it goes, 
of itself, still faster. The thing naturally differs in 
fact with the nature of the imagination; the question 
is one of proprieties and affinities, sympathy and pro- 
portion. The sympathy of the author of "Salammbo" 
was all with the magnificent, his imagination for the 
phrase as variously noble or ignoble in itself, contribu- 
tive or destructive, adapted and harmonious or casual 
and common. The worse among such possibilities have 
been multiplied by the infection of bad writing, and he 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 93 

denied that the better ever do anything so obliging as 
to come of themselves. They scarcely indeed for 
Flaubert "came" at all; their arrival was determined 
only by fasting and prayer or by patience of pursuit, 
the arts of the chase, long waits and watches, figura- 
tively speaking, among the peaks or by the waters. 
The production of a book was of course made inor- 
dinately slow by the fatigue of these measures; in il- 
lustration of which his letters often record that it has 
taken him three days 1 to arrive at one right sentence, 
tested by the pitch of his ideal of the right for the sug- 
gestion aimed at. His difficulties drew from the author, 
as I have mentioned, much resounding complaint; 
but those voices have ceased to trouble us and the 
final voice remains. No feature of the whole business 
is more edifying than the fact that he in the first place 
never misses style and in the second never appears 
to have beaten about for it. That betrayal is of course 
the worst betrayal of all, and I think the way he has 
escaped it the happiest form of the peace that has 
finally visited him. It was truly a wonderful success 
to be so the devotee of the phrase and yet never its 
victim. Fine as he inveterately desired it should be 
he still never lost sight of the question Fine for what ? 
It is always so related and associated, so properly part 
of something else that is in turn part of something 
other, part of a reference, a tone, a passage, a page, 

1 It was true, delightfully true, that, extravagance in this province of his 
life, though apparently in no other, being Flaubert's necessity and law, he 
deliberated and hung fire, wrestled, retreated and returned, indulged gen- 
erally in a tragi-comedy of waste; which I recall a charming expression of 
on the lips of Edmond de Goncourt, who quite recognised the heroic legend, 
but prettily qualified it: "II faut vous dire qu'il y avait la-dedans beaucoup 
de coucheries et d'ecole buissoniere." And he related how on the oc- 
casion of a stay with his friend under the roof of the Princess Mathilde, the 
friend, missed during the middle hours of a fine afternoon, was found to 
have undressed himself and gone to bed to think ! 



94 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

that the simple may enjoy it for its least bearing and 
the initiated for its greatest. That surely is to be a 
writer of the first order, to resemble when in the hand 
and however closely viewed a shapely crystal box, 
and yet to be seen when placed on the table and opened 
to contain innumerable compartments, springs and 
tricks. One is ornamental either way, but one is in 
the second way precious too. 

The crystal box then figures the style of "Salammbo" 
and "Saint-Antoine" in a greater degree than that of 
"Bovary," because, as the two former express the 
writer's romantic side, he had in them, while equally 
covering his tracks, still further to fare and still more 
to hunt. Beyond this allusion to their completing his 
duality I shall not attempt closely to characterise 
them; though I admit that in not insisting on them I 
press most lightly on the scale into which he had in his 
own view cast his greatest pressure. He lamented the 
doom that drove him so oddly, so ruefully, to choose 
his subjects, but he lamented it least when these sub- 
jects were most pompous and most exotic, feeling as 
he did that they had then after all most affinity with 
his special eloquence. In dealing with the near, the 
directly perceived, he had to keep down his tone, to 
make the eloquence small; though with the consequence, 
as we have seen, that in spite of such precautions the 
whole thing mostly insists on being ample. The 
familiar, that is, under his touch, took on character, 
importance, extension, one scarce knows what to call 
it, in order to carry the style or perhaps rather, as we 
may say, sit with proper ease in the vehicle, and there 
was accordingly a limit to its smallness; whereas in 
the romantic books, the preferred world of Flaubert's 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 95 

imagination, there was practically no need of com- 
promise. The compromise gave him throughout end- 
less trouble, and nothing would be more to the point 
than to show, had I space, why in particular it dis- 
tressed him. It was obviously his strange predicament 
that the only spectacle open to him by experience and 
direct knowledge was the bourgeois, which on that 
ground imposed on him successively his three so in- 
tensely bourgeois themes. He was obliged to treat 
these themes, which he hated, because his experience 
left him no alternative; his only alternative was given 
by history, geography, philosophy, fancy, the world of 
erudition and of imagination, the world especially of 
this last. In the bourgeois sphere his ideal of expres- 
sion laboured under protest; in the other, the imagined, 
the projected, his need for facts, for matter, and his 
pursuit of them, sat no less heavily. But as his style 
all the while required a certain exercise of pride he 
was on the whole more at home in the exotic than in 
the familiar; he escaped above all in the former con- 
nection the associations, the disparities he detested. 
He could be frankly noble in "Salammbo" and "Saint- 
Antoine," whereas in "Bovary" and "L'fiducation" 
he could be but circuitously and insidiously so. He 
could in the one case cut his coat according to his 
cloth — if we mean by his cloth his predetermined tone, 
while in the other he had to take it already cut. Sin- 
gular enough in his life the situation so constituted: 
the comparatively meagre human consciousness — for 
we must come back to that in him — struggling with the 
absolutely large artistic; and the large artistic half 
wreaking itself on the meagre human and half seeking 
a refuge from it, as well as a revenge against it, in some- 
thing quite different. 



96 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Flaubert had in fact command of two refuges which 
he worked in turn. The first of these was the attitude 
of irony, so constant in him that "L'fiducation" 
bristles and hardens with it and "Bouvard et Pe- 
cuchet" — strangest of "poetic" justices — is made as 
dry as sand and as heavy as lead; the second only was, 
by processes, by journeys the most expensive, to get 
away altogether. And we inevitably ask ourselves 
whether, eschewing the policy of flight, he might not 
after all have fought out his case a little more on the 
spot. Might he not have addressed himself to the 
human still otherwise than in "L'fiducation" and in 
" Bouvard" ? When one thinks of the view of the life 
of his country, of the vast French community and its 
constituent creatures, offered in these productions, one 
declines to believe it could make up the whole vision 
of a man of his quality. Or when all was said and done 
was he absolutely and exclusively condemned to irony ? 
The second lefuge I speak of, the getting away from 
the human, the congruously and measurably human, 
altogether, perhaps becomes in the light of this pos- 
sibility but an irony the more. Carthage and the 
Thebaid, Salammbo, Spendius, Matho, Hannon, Saint 
Anthony, Hilarion, the Paternians, the Marcosians 
and the Carpocratians, what are all these, inviting be- 
cause queer, but a confession of supreme impatience 
with the actual and the near, often queer enough too, 
no doubt, but not consolingly, not transcendently ? 
Last remains the question whether, even if our author's 
immediate as distinguished from his remote view had 
had more reach, the particular gift we claim for him, 
the perfection of arrangement and form, would have 
had in certain directions the acquired flexibility. 
States of mind, states of soul, of the simpler kind, the 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 97 

kinds supposable in the Emma Bovarys, the Frederics, 
the Bouvards and the Pecuchets, to say nothing of 
the Carthaginians and the Eremites — for Flaubert's 
eremites are eminently artless — these conditions rep- 
resent, I think, his proved psychological range. And 
that throws us back remarkably, almost confoundingly, 
upon another face of the general anomaly. The "gift" 
was of the greatest, a force in itself, in virtue of which 
he is a consummate writer; and yet there are whole 
sides of life to which it was never addressed and which 
it apparently quite failed to suspect as a field of exer- 
cise. If he never approached the complicated char- 
acter in man or woman — Emma Bovary is not the least 
little bit complicated — or the really furnished, the finely 
civilised, was this because, surprisingly, he could not ? 
Udme frangaise at all events shows in him but ill. 

This undoubtedly marks a limit, but limits are for 
the critic familiar country, and he may mostly well 
feel the prospect wide enough when he finds something 
positively well enough done. By disposition or by 
obligation Flaubert selected, and though his selection 
was in some respects narrow he stops not too short 
to have left us three really "cast" works and a fourth 
of several perfect parts, to say nothing of the element 
of perfection, of the superlative for the size, in his 
three nouvelles. What he attempted he attempted in 
a spirit that gives an extension to the idea of the 
achievable and the achieved in a literary thing, and 
it is by this that we contentedly gauge the matter. 
As success goes in this world of the approximate it 
may pass for success of the greatest. If I am unable 
to pursue the proof of my remark in "Salammbo" and 
"Saint-Antoine" it is because I have also had to 



98 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

select and have found the questions connected with 
their two companions more interesting. There are 
numerous judges, I hasten to mention, who, showing 
the opposite preference, lose themselves with rapture 
in the strange bristling archaeological picture — yet all 
amazingly vivified and co-ordinated — of the Cartha- 
ginian mercenaries in revolt and the sacred veil of the 
great goddess profaned and stolen; as well in the still 
more peopled panorama of the ancient sects, super- 
stitions and mythologies that swim in the desert before 
the fevered eyes of the Saint. One may be able, how- 
ever, at once to breathe more freely in "Bovary" 
than in "Salammbo" and yet to hope that there is no 
intention of the latter that one has missed. The 
great intention certainly, and little as we may be 
sweetly beguiled, holds us fast; which is simply the 
author's indomitable purpose of fully pervading his 
field. There are countries beyond the sea in which 
tracts are allowed to settlers on condition that they 
will really, not nominally, cultivate them. Flaubert 
is on his romantic ground like one of these settlers; he 
makes good with all his might his title to his tract, and 
in a way that shows how it is not only for him a ques- 
tion of safety but a question of honour. Honour de- 
mands that he shall set up his home and his faith there 
in such a way that every inch of the surface be planted 
or paved. He would have been ashamed merely to 
encamp and, after the fashion of most other adven- 
turers, knock up a log hut among charred stumps. 
This was not what would have been for him taking 
artistic possession, it was not what would have been 
for him even personal honour, let alone literary; and 
yet the general lapse from integrity was a thing that, 
wherever he looked, he saw not only condoned but ac- 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 99 

claimed and rewarded. He lived, as he felt, in an age 
of mean production and cheap criticism, the practical 
upshot of which took on for him a name that was 
often on his lips. He called it the hatred of literature, 
a hatred in the midst of which, the most literary of 
men, he found himself appointed to suffer. I may not, 
however, follow him in that direction — which would 
take us far; and the less that he was for himself after 
all, in spite of groans and imprecations, a man of re- 
sources and remedies, and that there was always his 
possibility of building himself in. 

This he did equally in all his books — built himself 
into literature by means of a material put together 
with extraordinary art; but it leads me again to the 
question of what such a stiff ideal imposed on him for 
the element of exactitude. This element, in the ro- 
mantic, was his merciless law; it was perhaps even in 
the romantic that — if there could indeed be degrees 
for him in such matters — he most despised the loose 
and the more-or-less. To be intensely definite and 
perfectly positive, to know so well what he meant 
that he could at every point strikingly and conclu- 
sively verify it, was the first of his needs; and if in ad- 
dition to being thus synthetically final he could be 
strange and sad and terrible, and leave the cause of 
these effects inscrutable, success then had for him its 
highest savour. We feel the inscrutability in those 
memorable few words that put before us Frederic 
Moreau's start upon his vain course of travel, "II 
connut alors la melancholie des paquebots;" an image 
to the last degree comprehensive and embracing, but 
which haunts us, in its droll pathos, without our quite 
knowing why. But he was really never so pleased as 



ioo NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

when he could be both rare and precise about the 
dreadful. His own sense of all this, as I have already 
indicated, was that beauty comes with expression, that 
expression is creation, that it makes the reality, and 
only in the degree in which it is, exquisitely, expres- 
sion; and that we move in literature through a world 
of different values and relations, a blest world in which 
we know nothing except by style, but in which also 
everything is saved by it, and in which the image is 
thus always superior to the thing itself. This quest 
and multiplication of the image, the image tested and 
warranted and consecrated for the occasion, was ac- 
cordingly his high elegance, to which he too much sac- 
rificed and to which "Salammbo" and partly "Saint- 
Antoine" are monstrous monuments. Old cruelties 
and perversities, old wonders and errors and terrors, 
endlessly appealed to him; they constitute the unhuman 
side of his work, and if we have not the bribe of curios- 
ity, of a lively interest in method, or rather in evoca- 
tion just as evocation, we tread our way among them, 
especially in "Salammbo," with a reserve too dry for 
our pleasure. To my own view the curiosity and the 
literary interest are equal in dealing with the non- 
romantic books, and the world presented, the aspects 
and agents, are less deterrent and more amenable 
both to our own social and expressional terms. Style 
itself moreover, with all respect to Flaubert, never 
totally beguiles; since even when we are so queerly 
constituted as to be ninety-nine parts literary we are 
still a hundredth part something else. This hundredth 
part may, once we possess the book — or the book pos- 
sesses us — make us imperfect as readers, and yet without 
it should we want or get the book at all ? The curiosity 
at any rate, to repeat, is even greatest for me in "Ma- 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 101 

dame Bovary, " say, for here I can measure, can more 
directly appreciate, the terms. The aspects and im- 
pressions being of an experience conceivable to me I 
am more touched by the beauty; my interest gets 
more of the benefit of the beauty even though this be 
not intrinsically greater. Which brings back our ap- 
preciation inevitably at last to the question of our 
author's lucidity. 

I have sufficiently remarked that I speak from the 
point of view of his interest to a reader of his own craft, 
the point of view of his extraordinary technical wealth 
— though indeed when I think of the general power of 
"Madame Bovary" I find myself desiring not to nar- 
row the ground of the lesson, not to connect the lesson, 
to its prejudice, with that idea of the "technical," 
that question of the way a thing is done, so abhorrent, 
as a call upon attention, in whatever art, to the won- 
drous Anglo-Saxon mind. Without proposing Flau- 
bert as the type of the newspaper novelist, or as an 
easy alternative to golf or the bicycle, we should do 
him less than justice in failing to insist that a master- 
piece like "Madame Bovary" may benefit even with 
the simple-minded by the way it has been done. It 
derives from its firm roundness that sign of all rare 
works that there is something in it for every one. It 
may be read ever so attentively, ever so freely, with- 
out a suspicion of how it is written, to say nothing of 
put together; it may equally be read under the excite- 
ment of these perceptions alone, one of the greatest 
known to the reader who is fully open to them. Both 
readers will have been transported, which is all any 
can ask. Leaving the first of them, however that may 
be, to state the case for himself, I state it yet again for 



102 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

the second, if only on this final ground. The book and 
its companions represent for us a practical solution, 
Flaubert's own troubled but settled one, of the eternal 
dilemma of the painter of life. From the moment 
this rash adventurer deals with his mysterious matter 
at all directly his desire is not to deal with it stintedly. 
It at the same time remains true that from the moment 
he desires to produce forms in which it shall be pre- 
served, he desires that these forms, things of his crea- 
tion, shall not be, as testifying to his way with them, 
weak or ignoble. He must make them complete and 
beautiful, of satisfactory production, intrinsically in- 
teresting, under peril of disgrace with those who know. 
Those who don't know of course don't count for him, 
and it neither helps nor hinders him to say that every 
one knows about life. Every one does not — it is dis- 
tinctly the case of the few; and if it were in fact the 
case of the many the knowledge still might exist, on 
the evidence around us, even in an age of unprecedented 
printing, without attesting itself by a multiplication of 
masterpieces. The question for the artist can only be 
of doing the artistic utmost, and thereby of seeing the 
general task. When it is seen with the intensity with 
which it presented itself to Flaubert a lifetime is none 
too much for fairly tackling it. It must either be left 
alone or be dealt with, and to leave it alone is a com- 
paratively simple matter. 

To deal with it is on the other hand to produce a 
certain number of finished works; there being no other 
known method; and the quantity of life depicted will 
depend on this array. What will this array, however, 
depend on, and what will condition the number of pieces 
of which it is composed? The "finish," evidently, 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 103 

that the formula so glibly postulates and for which the 
novelist is thus so handsomely responsible. He has 
on the one side to feel his subject and on the other side 
to render it, and there are undoubtedly two ways in 
which his situation may be expressed, especially per- 
haps by himself. The more he feels his subject the 
more he can render it — that is the first way. The more 
he renders it the more he can feel it — that is the second 
way. This second way was unmistakeably Flaubert's, 
and if the result of it for him was a bar to abundant 
production he could only accept such an incident as 
part of the game. He probably for that matter would 
have challenged any easy definition of "abundance," 
contested the application of it to the repetition, how- 
ever frequent, of the thing not "done." What but the 
"doing" makes the thing, he would have asked, and 
how can a positive result from a mere iteration of 
negatives, or wealth proceed from the simple addition 
of so many instances of penury ? We should here, in 
closer communion with him, have got into his highly 
characteristic and suggestive view of the fertilisation 
of subject by form, penetration of the sense, ever, by 
the expression — the latter reacting creatively on the 
former; a conviction in the light of which he appears 
to have wrought with real consistency and which 
borrows from him thus its high measure of credit. It 
would undoubtedly have suffered if his books had been 
things of a loose logic, whereas we refer to it not only 
without shame but with an encouraged confidence by 
their showing of a logic so close. Let the phrase, the 
form that the whole is at the given moment staked on, 
be beautiful and related, and the rest will take care of 
itself — such is a rough indication of Flaubert's faith; 
which has the importance that it was a faith sincere, 



io 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

active and inspiring. I hasten to add indeed that we 
must most of all remember how in these matters every- 
thing hangs on definitions. The "beautiful," with 
our author, covered for the phrase a great deal of 
ground, and when every sort of propriety had been 
gathered in under it and every relation, in a complexity 
of such, protected, the idea itself, the presiding thought, 
ended surely by being pretty well provided for. 

These, however, are subordinate notes, and the plain 
question, in the connection I have touched upon, is of 
whether we would really wish him to have written 
more books, say either of the type of "Bovary" or of 
the type of "Salammbo," and not have written them 
so well. When the production of a great artist who has 
lived a length of years has been small there is always 
the regret; but there is seldom, any more than here, 
the conceivable remedy. For the case is doubtless 
predetermined by the particular kind of great artist a 
writer happens to be, and this even if when we come to 
the conflict, to the historic case, deliberation and delay 
may not all have been imposed by temperament. The 
admirable George Sand, Flaubert's beneficent friend 
and correspondent, is exactly the happiest example 
we could find of the genius constitutionally incapable 
of worry, the genius for whom style "came," for whom 
the sought effect was ever quickly and easily struck off, 
the book freely and swiftly written, and who conse- 
quently is represented for us by upwards of ninety 
volumes. If the comparison were with this lady's 
great contemporary the elder Dumas the disparity 
would be quadrupled, but that ambiguous genius, 
somehow never really caught by us in the fact of com- 
position, is out of our concern here: the issue is of those 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 105 

developments of expression which involve a style, 
and as Dumas never so much as once grazed one in 
all his long career, there was not even enough of that 
grace in him for a fillip of the finger-nail. Flaubert is 
at any rate represented by six books, so that he may on 
that estimate figure as poor, while Madame Sand, 
falling so little short of a hundred, figures as rich; 
and yet the fact remains that I can refer the congenial 
mind to him with confidence and can do nothing of 
the sort for it in respect to Madame Sand. She is 
loose and liquid and iridescent, as iridescent as we may 
undertake to find her; but I can imagine compositions 
quite without virtue — the virtue I mean, of sticking 
together — begotten by the impulse to emulate her. 
She had undoubtedly herself the benefit of her facility, 
but are we not left wondering to what extent we have 
it ? There is too little in her, by the literary connection, 
for the critical mind, weary of much wandering, to 
rest upon. Flaubert himself wandered, wandered far, 
went much roundabout and sometimes lost himself 
by the way, but how handsomely he provided for our 
present repose ! He found the French language incon- 
ceivably difficult to write with elegance and was con- 
fronted with the equal truths that elegance is the last 
thing that languages, even as they most mature, seem 
to concern themselves with, and that at the same time 
taste, asserting rights, insists on it, to the effect of 
showing us in a boundless circumjacent waste of effort 
what the absence of it may mean. He saw the less of 
this desert of death come back to that — that every- 
thing at all saved from it for us since the beginning 
had been saved by a soul of elegance within, or in 
other words by the last refinement of selection, by the 
indifference on the part of the very idiom, huge quite 



106 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

other than "composing" agent, to the individual pre- 
tension. Recognising thus that to carry through the 
individual pretension is at the best a battle, he adored 
a hard surface and detested a soft one — much more a 
muddled; regarded a style without rhythm and har- 
mony as in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. 
He considered that the failure of complete expression 
so registered made of the work of pretended beauty a 
work of achieved barbarity. It would take us far to 
glance even at his fewest discriminations; but rhythm 
and harmony were for example most menaced in his 
scheme by repetition — when repetition had not a 
positive grace; and were above all most at the mercy 
of the bristling particles of which our modern tongues 
are mainly composed and which make of the desired 
surface a texture pricked through, from beneath, even 
to destruction, as by innumerable thorns. 

On these lines production was of course slow work for 
him — especially as he met the difficulty, met it with 
an inveteracy which shows how it can be met; and full 
of interest for readers of English speech is the reflec- 
tion he causes us to make as to the possibility of suc- 
cess at all comparable among ourselves. I have spoken 
of his groans and imprecations, his interminable waits 
and deep despairs; but what would these things have 
been, what would have become of him and what of his 
wrought residuum, had he been condemned to deal 
with a form of speech consisting, like ours, as to one 
part, of "that" and "which"; as to a second part, of 
the blest "it," which an English sentence may repeat 
in three or four opposed references without in the least 
losing caste; as to a third face of all the "tos" of the 
infinitive and the preposition; as to a fourth of our pre- 



GUSTAVE FLAUBERT 107 

cious auxiliaries "be" and "do"; and as to a fifth, of 
whatever survives in the language for the precious art 
of pleasing ? Whether or no the fact that the painter 
of "life" among us has to contend with a medium in- 
trinsically indocile, on certain sides, like our own, 
whether this drawback accounts for his having failed, 
in our time, to treat us, arrested and charmed, to a 
single case of crowned classicism, there is at any rate 
no doubt that we in some degree owe Flaubert's counter- 
weight for that deficiency to his having, on his own 
ground, more happily triumphed. By which I do not 
mean that "Madame Bovary" is a classic because the 
"thats," the "its" and the "tos" are made to march 
as Orpheus and his lute made the beasts, but because 
the element of order and harmony works as a symbol of 
everything else that is preserved for us by the history 
of the book. The history of the book remains the 
lesson and the important, the delightful thing, remains 
above all the drama that moves slowly to its climax. 
It is what we come back to for the sake of what it shows 
us. We see — from the present to the past indeed, 
never alas from the present to the future — how a classic 
almost inveterately grows. Unimportant, unnoticed, 
or, so far as noticed, contested, unrelated, alien, it 
has a cradle round which the fairies but scantly flock 
and is waited on in general by scarce a hint of sig- 
nificance. The significance comes by a process slow 
and small, the fact only that one perceptive private 
reader after another discovers at his convenience that 
the book is rare. The addition of the perceptive 
private readers is no quick affair, and w T ould doubtless 
be a vain one did they not — while plenty of other much 
more remarkable books come and go — accumulate and 
count. They count by their quality and continuity of 



108 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

attention; so they have gathered for "Madame Bo- 
vary," and so they are held. That is really once more 
the great circumstance. It is always in order for us 
to feel yet again what it is we are held by. Such is 
my reason, definitely, for speaking of Flaubert as the 
novelist's novelist. Are we not moreover — and let it 
pass this time as a happy hope ! — pretty well all novel- 
ists now ? 






HONORE DE BALZAC 
1902 



Stronger than ever, even than under the spell of first 
acquaintance and of the early time, is the sense — thanks 
to a renewal of intimacy and, I am tempted to say, of 
loyalty — that Balzac stands signally apart, that he is 
the first and foremost member of his craft, and that 
above all the Balzac-lover is in no position till he has 
cleared the ground by saying so. The Balzac-lover 
alone, for that matter, is worthy to have his word on 
so happy an occasion as this 1 about the author of "La 
Comedie Humaine," and it is indeed not easy to see 
how the amount of attention so inevitably induced 
could at the worst have failed to find itself turning to 
an act of homage. I have been deeply affected, to 
be frank, by the mere refreshment of memory, which 
has brought in its train moreover consequences critical 
and sentimental too numerous to figure here in their 
completeness. The authors and the books that have, 
as we say, done something for us, become part of the 
answer to our curiosity when our curiosity had the 
freshness of youth, these particular agents exist for 
us, with the lapse of time, as the substance itself of 
knowledge: they have been intellectually so swallowed, 
digested and assimilated that we take their general 

2 The appearance of a translation of the "Deux Jeunes Mariees" in A 
Century of French Romance. 

109 



no NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

use and suggestion for granted, cease to be aware of 
them because they have passed out of sight. But 
they have passed out of sight simply by having passed 
into our lives. They have become a part of our per- 
sonal history, a part of ourselves, very often, so far 
as we may have succeeded in best expressing our- 
selves. Endless, however, are the uses of great per- 
sons and great things, and it may easily happen in 
these cases that the connection, even as an "excite- 
ment" — the form mainly of the connections of youth 
— is never really broken. We have largely been living 
on our benefactor — which is the highest acknowledg- 
ment one can make; only, thanks to a blest law that 
operates in the long run to rekindle excitement, we are 
accessible to the sense of having neglected him. Even 
when we may not constantly have read him over the 
neglect is quite an illusion, but the illusion perhaps 
prepares us for the finest emotion we are to have owed 
to the acquaintance. Without having abandoned or 
denied our author we yet come expressly back to him, 
and if not quite in tatters and in penitence like the 
Prodigal Son, with something at all events of the ten- 
derness with which we revert to the parental thresh- 
old and hearthstone, if not, more fortunately, to the 
parental presence. The beauty of this adventure, 
that of seeing the dust blown off a relation that had 
been put away as on a shelf, almost out of reach, at 
the back of one's mind, consists in finding the precious 
object not only fresh and intact, but with its firm 
lacquer still further figured, gilded and enriched. It 
is all overscored with traces and impressions — vivid, 
definite, almost as valuable as itself — of the recog- 
nitions and agitations it originally produced in us. Our 
old — that is our young — feelings are very nearly what 



HONORS DE BALZAC in 

page after page most gives us. The case has become 
a case .of authority plus association. If Balzac in 
himself is indubitably wanting in the sufficiently com- 
mon felicity we know as charm, it is this association 
that may on occasion contribute the grace. 

The impression then, confirmed and brightened, is of 
the mass and weight of the figure and of the extent 
of ground it occupies; a tract on which we might all 
of us together quite pitch our little tents, open our 
little booths, deal in our little wares, and not materially 
either diminish the area or impede the circulation of 
the occupant. I seem to see him in such an image 
moving about as Gulliver among the pigmies, and not 
less good-natured than Gulliver for the exercise of 
any function, without exception, that can illustrate 
his larger life. The first and the last word about the 
author of "Les Contes Drolatiques' , is that of all 
novelists he is the most serious — by which I am far 
from meaning that in the human comedy as he shows 
it the comic is an absent quantity. His sense of the 
comic was on the scale of his extraordinary senses in 
general, though his expression of it suffers perhaps 
exceptionally from that odd want of elbow-room — the 
penalty somehow of his close-packed, pressed-down 
contents — which reminds us of some designedly beauti- 
ful thing but half-disengaged from the clay or the 
marble. It is the scheme and the scope that are 
supreme in him, applying this moreover not to mere 
great intention, but to the concrete form, the proved 
case, in which we possess them. We most of us aspire 
to achieve at the best but a patch here and there, to 
pluck a sprig or a single branch, to break ground in a 
corner of the great garden of life. Balzac's plan was 



ii2 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

simply to do everything that could be done. He 
proposed to himself to "turn over" the great garden 
from north to south and from east to west; a task — 
immense, heroic, to this day immeasurable — that he 
bequeathed us the partial performance of, a prodig- 
ious ragged clod, in the twenty monstrous years repre- 
senting his productive career, years of concentration 
and sacrifice the vision of which still makes us ache. 
He had indeed a striking good fortune, the only one 
he was to enjoy as an harassed and exasperated worker: 
the great garden of life presented itself to him abso- 
lutely and exactly in the guise of the great garden of 
France, a subject vast and comprehensive enough, yet 
with definite edges and corners. This identity of his 
universal with his local and national vision is the 
particular thing we should doubtless call his greatest 
strength were we preparing agreeably to speak of it 
also as his visible weakness. Of Balzac's weaknesses, 
however, it takes some assurance to talk; there is 
always plenty of time for them; they are the last 
signs we know him by — such things truly as in other 
painters of manners often come under the head of 
mere exuberance of energy. So little in short do they 
earn the invidious name even when we feel them as 
defects. 

What he did above all was to read the universe, as 
hard and as loud as he could, into the France of his 
time; his own eyes regarding his work as at once the 
drama of man and a mirror of the mass of social phe- 
nomena the most rounded and registered, most or- 
ganised and administered, and thereby most exposed 
to systematic observation and portrayal, that the 
world had seen. There are happily other interesting 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 113 

societies, but these are for schemes of such an order 
comparatively loose and incoherent, with more extent 
and perhaps more variety, but with less of the great 
enclosed and exhibited quality, less neatness and 
sharpness of arrangement, fewer categories, sub- 
divisions, juxtapositions. Balzac's France was both 
inspiring enough for an immense prose epic and re- 
ducible enough for a report or a chart. To allow his 
achievement all its dignity we should doubtless say 
also treatable enough for a history, since it was as a 
patient historian, a Benedictine of the actual, the 
living painter of his living time, that he regarded him- 
self and handled his material. All painters of manners 
and fashions, if we will, are historians, even when they 
least don the uniform: Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, 
George Eliot, Hawthorne among ourselves. But the 
great difference between the great Frenchman and 
the eminent others is that, with an imagination of 
the highest power, an unequalled intensity of vision, he 
saw his subject in the light of science as well, in the 
light of the bearing of all its parts on each other, and 
under pressure of a passion for exactitude, an appetite, 
the appetite of an ogre, for all the kinds of facts. 
We find I think in the union here suggested something 
like the truth about his genius, the nearest approach 
to a final account of him. Of imagination on one side 
all compact, he was on the other an insatiable reporter 
of the immediate, the material, the current combina- 
tion, and perpetually moved by the historian's impulse 
to fix, preserve and explain them. One asks one's self 
as one reads him what concern the poet has with so 
much arithmetic and so much criticism, so many 
statistics and documents, what concern the critic and 
the economist have with so many passions, characters 



ii 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

and adventures. The contradiction is always before 
us; it springs from the inordinate scale of the author's 
two faces; it explains more than anything else his ec- 
centricities and difficulties. It accounts for his want of 
grace, his want of the lightness associated with an 
amusing literary form, his bristling surface, his close- 
ness of texture, so rough with richness, yet so pro- 
ductive of the effect we have in mind when we speak of 
not being able to see the wood for the trees. 

A thorough-paced votary, for that matter, can 
easily afford to declare at once that this confounding 
duality of character does more things still, or does at 
least the most important of all — introduces us without 
mercy (mercy for ourselves I mean) to the oddest truth 
we could have dreamed of meeting in such a connec- 
tion. It was certainly a priori not to be expected we 
should feel it of him, but our hero is after all not in 
his magnificence totally an artist: which would be the 
strangest thing possible, one must hasten to add, were 
not the smallness of the practical difference so made 
even stranger. His endowment and his effect are each 
so great that the anomaly makes at the most a differ- 
ence only by adding to his interest for the critic. 
The critic worth his salt is indiscreetly curious and 
wants ever to know how and why — whereby Balzac 
is thus a still rarer case for him, suggesting that ex- 
ceptional curiosity may have exceptional rewards. 
The question of what makes the artist on a great 
scale is interesting enough; but we feel it in Balzac's 
company to be nothing to the question of what on an 
equal scale frustrates him. The scattered pieces, the 
disjecta membra of the character are here so numerous 
and so splendid that they prove misleading; we pile 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 115 

them together, and the heap assuredly is monumental; 
it forms an overtopping figure. The genius this figure 
stands for, none the less, is really such a lesson to the 
artist as perfection itself would be powerless to give; 
it carries him so much further into the special mys- 
tery. Where it carries him, at the same time, I must 
not in this scant space attempt to say — which would 
be a loss of the fine thread of my argument. I stick 
to our point in putting it, more concisely, that the 
artist of the Comedie Humaine is half smothered by 
the historian. Yet it belongs as well to the matter 
also to meet the question of whether the historian 
himself may not be an artist — in which case Balzac's 
catastrophe would seem to lose its excuse. The answer 
of course is that the reporter, however philosophic, has 
one law, and the originator, however substantially fed, 
has another; so that the two laws can with no sort of 
harmony or congruity make, for the finer sense, a 
common household. Balzac's catastrophe — so to name 
it once again — was in this perpetual conflict and final 
impossibility, an impossibility that explains his defeat 
on the classic side and extends so far at times as to 
make us think of his work as, from the point of view of 
beauty, a tragic waste of effort. 

What it would come to, we judge, is that the irrec- 
oncilability of the two kinds of law is, more simply 
expressed, but the irreconcilability of two different 
ways of composing one's effect. The principle of 
composition that his free imagination would have, or 
certainly might have, handsomely imposed on him is 
perpetually dislocated by the quite opposite principle 
of the earnest seeker, the inquirer to a useful end, in 
whom nothing is free but a born antipathy to his yoke- 



n6 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

fellow. Such a production as "Le Cure de Village/' 
the wonderful story of Madame Graslin, so nearly a 
masterpiece yet so ultimately not one, would be, in 
this connection, could I take due space for it, a perfect 
illustration. If, as I say, Madame Graslin's creator 
was confined by his doom to patches and pieces, no 
piece is finer than the first half of the book in question, 
the half in which the picture is determined by his 
unequalled power of putting people on their feet, 
planting them before us in their habit as they lived — 
a faculty nourished by observation as much as one will, 
but with the inner vision all the while wide-awake, the 
vision for which ideas are as living as facts and assume 
an equal intensity. This intensity, greatest indeed in 
the facts, has in Balzac a force all its own, to which 
none other in any novelist I know can be likened. His 
touch communicates on the spot to the object, the 
creature evoked, the hardness and permanence that 
certain substances, some sorts of stone, acquire by ex- 
posure to the air. The hardening medium, for the 
image soaked in it, is the air of his mind. It would 
take but little more to make the peopled world of 
fiction as we know it elsewhere affect us by contrast 
as a world of rather gray pulp. This mixture of the 
solid and the vivid is Balzac at his best, and it pre- 
vails without a break, without a note not admirably 
true, in "Le Cure de Village" — since I have named 
that instance — up to the point at which Madame 
Graslin moves out from Limoges to Montegnac in her 
ardent passion of penitence, her determination to 
expiate her strange and undiscovered association with 
a dark misdeed by living and working for others. Her 
drama is a particularly inward one, interesting, and 
in the highest degree, so long as she herself, her nature, 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 117 

her behaviour, her personal history and the relations 
in which they place her, control the picture and feed 
our illusion. The firmness with which the author 
makes them play this part, the whole constitution of 
the scene and of its developments from the moment 
we cross the threshold of her dusky stuffy old-time 
birth-house, is a rare delight, producing in the reader 
that sense of local and material immersion which is 
one of Balzac's supreme secrets. What character- 
istically befalls, however, is that the spell accompanies 
us but part of the way — only until, at a given moment, 
his attention ruthlessly transfers itself from inside to 
outside, from the centre of his subject to its circum- 
ference. 

This is Balzac caught in the very fact of his mon- 
strous duality, caught in his most complete self-ex- 
pression. He is clearly quite unwitting that in hand- 
ing over his data to his twin-brother the impassioned 
economist and surveyor, the insatiate general inquirer 
and reporter, he is in any sort betraying our confidence, 
for his good conscience at such times, the spirit of 
edification in him, is a lesson even to the best of us, 
his rich robust temperament nowhere more striking, 
no more marked anywhere the great push of the 
shoulder with which he makes his theme move, over- 
charged though it may be like a carrier's van. It is 
not therefore assuredly that he loses either sincerity or 
power in putting before us to the last detail such a mat- 
ter as, in this case, his heroine's management of her 
property, her tenantry, her economic opportunities and 
visions, for these are cases in which he never shrinks 
nor relents, in which positively he stiffens and terribly 
towers — to remind us again of M. Taine's simplifying 



n8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

word about his being an artist doubled with a man of 
business. Balzac was indeed doubled if ever a writer 
was, and to that extent that we almost as often, while 
we read, feel ourselves thinking of him as a man of 
business doubled with an artist. Whichever way we 
turn it the oddity never fails, nor the wonder of the 
ease with which either character bears the burden of 
the other. I use the word burden because, as the fusion 
is never complete — witness in the book before us the 
fatal break of "tone," the one unpardonable sin for 
the novelist — we are beset by the conviction that but 
for this strangest of dooms one or other of the two 
partners might, to our relief and to his own, have been 
disembarrassed. The disembarrassment, for each, by 
a more insidious fusion, would probably have conduced 
to the mastership of interest proceeding from form, or 
at all events to the search for it, that Balzac fails to 
embody. Perhaps the possibility of an artist con- 
structed on such strong lines is one of those fine things 
that are not of this world, a mere dream of the fond 
critical spirit. Let these speculations and condona- 
tions at least pass as the amusement, as a result of the 
high spirits — if high spirits be the word — of the reader 
feeling himself again in touch. It was not of our 
author's difficulties — that is of his difficulty, the great 
one — that I proposed to speak, but of his immense 
clear action. Even that is not truly an impression of 
ease, and it is strange and striking that we are in fact 
so attached by his want of the unity that keeps sur- 
faces smooth and dangers down as scarce to feel sure 
at any moment that we shall not come back to it 
with most curiosity. We are never so curious about 
successes as about interesting failures. The more 
reason therefore to speak promptly, and once for all, 



HONORE DE BALZAC 119 

of the scale on which, in its own quarter of his genius, 
success worked itself out for him. 

It is to that I should come back — to the infinite reach 
in him of the painter and the poet. We can never know 
what might have become of him with less importunity 
in his consciousness of the machinery of life, of its 
furniture and fittings, of all that, right and left, he 
causes to assail us, sometimes almost to suffocation, 
under the general rubric of things. Things, in this 
sense with him, are at once our delight and our despair; 
we pass from being inordinately beguiled and con- 
vinced by them to feeling that his universe fairly 
smells too much of them, that the larger ether, the 
diviner air, is in peril of finding among them scarce 
room to circulate. His landscapes, his "local colour" 
— thick in his pages at a time when it was to be found 
in his pages almost alone — his towns, his streets, his 
houses, his Saumurs, Angoulemes, Guerandes, his great 
prose Turner-views of the land of the Loire, his rooms, 
shops, interiors, details of domesticity and traffic, are 
a short list of the terms into which he saw the real 
as clamouring to be rendered and into which he ren- 
dered it with unequalled authority. It would be 
doubtless more to the point to make our profit of this 
consummation than to try to reconstruct a Balzac 
planted more in the open. We hardly, as the case 
stands, know most whether to admire in such an ex- 
ample as the short tale of "La Grenadiere" the ex- 
quisite feeling for "natural objects ,, with which it 
overflows like a brimming wine-cup, the energy of 
perception and description which so multiplies them 
for beauty's sake and for the love of their beauty, or 
the general wealth of genius that can calculate, or at 



120 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

least count, so little and spend so joyously. The tale 
practically exists for the sake of the enchanting as- 
pects involved — those of the embowered white house 
that nestles on its terraced hill above the great French 
river, and we can think, frankly, of no one else with 
an equal amount of business on his hands who would 
either have so put himself out for aspects or made them 
almost by themselves a living subject. A born son of 
Touraine, it must be said, he pictures his province, 
on every pretext and occasion, with filial passion and 
extraordinary breadth. The prime aspect in his 
scene all the while, it must be added, is the money 
aspect. The general money question so loads him up 
and weighs him down that he moves through the human 
comedy, from beginning to end, very much in the 
fashion of a camel, the ship of the desert, surmounted 
with a cargo. "Things" for him are francs and cen- 
times more than any others, and I give up as inscru- 
table, unfathomable, the nature, the peculiar avidity 
of his interest in them. It makes us wonder again 
and again what then is the use on Balzac's scale of 
the divine faculty. The imagination, as we all know, 
may be employed up to a certain point in inventing 
uses for money; but its office beyond that point is 
surely to make us forget that anything so odious exists. 
This is what Balzac never forgot; his universe goes on 
expressing itself for him, to its furthest reaches, on 
its finest sides, in the terms of the market. To say 
these things, however, is after all to come out where 
we want, to suggest his extraordinary scale and his 
terrible completeness. I am not sure that he does not 
see character too, see passion, motive, personality, as 
quite in the order of the "things" we have spoken of. 
He makes them no less concrete and palpable, handles 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 121 

them no less directly and freely. It is the whole busi- 
ness in fine — that grand total to which he proposed to 
himself to do high justice — that gives him his place 
apart, makes him, among the novelists, the largest 
weightiest presence. There are some of his obsessions 
— that of the material, that of the financial, that of 
the "social," that of the technical, political, civil — 
for which I feel myself unable to judge him, judgment 
losing itself unexpectedly in a particular shade of pity. 
The way to judge him is to try to walk all round him — 
on which we see how remarkably far we have to go. 
He is the only member of his order really monumental, 
the sturdiest-seated mass that rises in our path. 

II 

We recognise none the less that the finest conse- 
quence of these re-established relations is linked with 
just that appearance in him, that obsession of the 
actual under so many heads, that makes us look at 
him, as we would at some rare animal in captivity, be- 
tween the bars of a cage. It amounts to a sort of suf- 
fered doom, since to be solicited by the world from 
all quarters at once, what is that for the spirit but a 
denial of escape ? We feel his doom to be his want of 
a private door, and that he felt it, though more ob- 
scurely, himself. When we speak of his want of charm 
therefore we perhaps so surrender the question as but 
to show our own poverty. If charm, to cut it short, 
is what he lacks, how comes it that he so touches and 
holds us that — above all if we be actual or possible 
fellow-workers — we are uncomfortably conscious of 
the disloyalty of almost any shade of surrender ? We 
are lodged perhaps by our excited sensibility in a di- 



122 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

lemma of which one of the horns is a compassion that 
savours of patronage; but we must resign ourselves 
to that by reflecting that our partiality at least takes 
nothing away from him. It leaves him solidly where 
he is and only brings us near, brings us to a view of all 
his formidable parts and properties. The conception 
of the Comedie Humaine represents them all, and rep- 
resents them mostly in their felicity and their triumph 
— or at least the execution does: in spite of which we 
irresistibly find ourselves thinking of him, in reperusals, 
as most essentially the victim of a cruel joke. The 
joke is one of the jokes of fate, the fate that rode him 
for twenty years at so terrible a pace and with the whip 
so constantly applied. To have wanted to do so much, 
to have thought it possible, to have faced and in a man- 
ner resisted the effort, to have felt life poisoned and 
consumed by such a bravery of self-committal — these 
things form for us in him a face of trouble that, oddly 
enough, is not appreciably lighted by the fact of his 
success. It was the having wanted to do so much that 
was the trap, whatever possibilities of glory might 
accompany the good faith with which he fell into it. 
What accompanies us as we frequent him is a sense of 
the deepening ache of that good faith with the increase 
of his working consciousness, the merciless develop- 
ment of his huge subject and of the rigour of all the 
conditions. We see the whole thing quite as if Des- 
tiny had said to him: "You want to 'do* France, pre- 
sumptuous, magnificent, miserable man — the France 
of revolutions, revivals, restorations, of Bonapartes, 
Bourbons, republics, of war and peace, of blood and 
romanticism, of violent change and intimate continuity, 
the France of the first half of your century ? Very 
well; you most distinctly shall, and you shall partic- 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 123 

ularly let me hear, even if the great groan of your 
labour do fill at moments the temple of letters, how you 
like the job." We must of course not appear to deny 
the existence of a robust joy in him, the joy of power 
and creation, the joy of the observer and the dreamer 
who finds a use for his observations and his dreams 
as fast as they come. The "Contes Drolatiques" 
would by themselves sufficiently contradict us, and the 
savour of the "Contes Drolatiques" is not confined to 
these productions. His work at large tastes of the 
same kind of humour, and we feel him again and again, 
like any other great healthy producer of these matters, 
beguiled and carried along. He would have been, I 
dare say, the last not to insist that the artist has plea- 
sures forever indescribable; he lived in short in his 
human comedy with the largest life we can attribute 
to the largest capacity. There are particular parts of 
his subject from which, with our sense of his enjoy- 
ment of them, we have to check the impulse to call him 
away — frequently as I confess in this relation that im- 
pulse arises. 

The relation is with the special element of his spec- 
tacle from which he never fully detaches himself, the 
element, to express it succinctly, of the "old families " 
and the great ladies. Balzac frankly revelled in his 
conception of an aristocracy — a conception that never 
succeeded in becoming his happiest; whether, objec- 
tively, thanks to the facts supplied him by the society 
he studied, or through one of the strangest deviations 
of taste that the literary critic is in an important con- 
nection likely to encounter. Nothing would in fact 
be more interesting than to attempt a general measure 
of the part played in the total comedy, to his imagina- 



i2 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

tion, by the old families; and one or two contributions 
to such an attempt I must not fail presently to make. 
I glance at them here, however, the delectable class, 
but as most representing on the author's part free and 
amused creation; by which too I am far from hinting 
that the amusement is at all at their expense. It is in 
their great ladies that the old families most shine out 
for him, images of strange colour and form, but "felt" 
as we say, to their finger-tips, and extraordinarily in- 
teresting as a mark of the high predominance — pre- 
dominance of character, of cleverness, of will, of gen- 
eral "personality" — that almost every scene of the 
Comedy attributes to women. It attributes to them 
in fact a recognised, an uncontested supremacy; it 
is through them that the hierarchy of old families most 
expresses itself; and it is as surrounded by them even 
as some magnificent indulgent pasha by his overflow- 
ing seraglio that Balzac sits most at his ease. All of 
which reaffirms — if it be needed — that his inspiration, 
and the sense of it, were even greater than his task. 
And yet such betrayals of spontaneity in him make 
for an old friend at the end of the chapter no great dif- 
ference in respect to the pathos — since it amounts to 
that — of his genius-ridden aspect. It comes to us as 
we go back to him that his spirit had fairly made of 
itself a cage in which he was to turn round and round, 
always unwinding his reel, much in the manner of 
a criminal condemned to hard labour for life. The 
cage is simply the complicated but dreadfully definite 
French world that built itself so solidly in and roofed 
itself so impenetrably over him. 

It is not that, caught there with him though we be, 
we ourselves prematurely seek an issue: we throw our- 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 125 

selves back, on the contrary, for the particular sense of 
it, into his ancient superseded comparatively rococo 
and quite patriarchal France — patriarchal in spite of 
social and political convulsions; into his old-time ante- 
diluvian Paris, all picturesque and all workable, full, 
to the fancy, of an amenity that has passed away; 
into his intensely differentiated sphere of la province, 
evoked in each sharpest or faintest note of its differ- 
ence, described systematically as narrow and flat, and 
yet attaching us if only by the contagion of the authors 
overflowing sensibility. He feels in his vast exhibition 
many things, but there is nothing he feels with the 
communicable shocks and vibrations, the sustained fury 
of perception — not always a fierceness of judgment, 
which is another matter — that la province excites in 
him. Half our interest in him springs still from our 
own sense that, for all the convulsions, the revolutions 
and experiments that have come and gone, the order 
he describes is the old order that our sense of the past 
perversely recurs to as to something happy we have 
irretrievably missed. His pages bristle with the revela- 
tion of the lingering earlier world, the world in which 
places and people still had their queerness, their strong 
marks, their sharp type, and in which, as before the 
platitude that was to come, the observer with an appe- 
tite for the salient could by way of precaution fill his 
lungs. Balzac's appetite for the salient was voracious, 
yet he came, as it were, in time, in spite of his so often 
speaking as if what he sees about him is but the last 
desolation of the modern. His conservatism, the most 
entire, consistent and convinced that ever was — yet 
even at that much inclined to whistling in the dark as 
if to the tune of "Oh how mediaeval I am!" — was doubt- 
less the best point of view from which he could rake his 



126 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

field. But if what he sniffed from afar in that position 
was the extremity of change, we in turn feel both 
subject and painter drenched with the smell of the past. 
It is preserved in his work as nowhere else — not vague 
nor faint nor delicate, but as strong to-day as when 
first distilled. 

It may seem odd to find a conscious melancholy in 
the fact that a great worker succeeded in clasping his 
opportunity in such an embrace, this being exactly 
our usual measure of the felicity of great workers. I 
speak, I hasten to reassert, all in the name of sympa- 
thy — without which it would have been detestable to 
speak at all; and the sentiment puts its hand instinc- 
tively on the thing that makes it least futile. This 
particular thing then is not in the least Balzac's own 
hold of his terrible mass of matter; it is absolutely the 
convolutions of the serpent he had with a magnificent 
courage invited to wind itself round him. We must 
use the common image — he had created his Franken- 
stein monster. It is the fellow-craftsman who can 
most feel for him — it being apparently possible to read 
him from another point of view without getting really 
into his presence. We undergo with him from book 
to book, from picture to picture, the convolutions of 
the serpent, we especially whose refined performances 
are given, as we know, but with the small common or 
garden snake. I stick to this to justify my image 
just above of his having been "caged" by the intensity 
with which he saw his general matter as a whole. To 
see it always as a whole is our wise, our virtuous effort, 
the very condition, as we keep in mind, of superior 
art. Balzac was in this connection then wise and vir- 
tuous to the most exemplary degree; so that he doubt- 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 127 

less ought logically but to prompt to complacent reflec- 
tions. No painter ever saw his general matter nearly 
so much as a whole. Why is it then that we hover 
about him, if we are real Balzacians, not with cheerful 
chatter, but with a consideration deeper in its reach 
than any mere moralising ? The reason is largely that 
if you wish with absolute immaculate virtue to look 
at your matter as a whole and yet remain a theme for 
cheerful chatter, you must be careful to take some 
quantity that will not hug you to death. Balzac's 
active intention was, to vary our simile, a beast with 
a hundred claws, and the spectacle is in the hugging 
process of which, as energy against energy, the beast 
was capable. Its victim died of the process at fifty, 
and if what we see in the long gallery in which it is 
mirrored is not the defeat, but the admirable resistance, 
we none the less never lose the sense that the fighter is 
shut up with his fate. He has locked himself in — it 
is doubtless his own fault — and thrown the key away. 
Most of all perhaps the impression comes — the impres- 
sion of the adventurer committed and anxious, but 
with no retreat — from the so formidably concrete 
nature of his plastic stuff. When we work in the open, 
as it were, our material is not classed and catalogued, 
so that we have at hand a hundred ways of being loose, 
superficial, disingenuous, and yet passing, to our no 
small profit, for remarkable. Balzac had no "open"; 
he held that the great central normal fruitful country 
of his birth and race, overarched with its infinite social 
complexity, yielded a sufficiency of earth and sea and 
sky. We seem to see as his catastrophe that the sky, 
all the same, came down on him. He couldn't keep 
it up — in more senses than one. These are perhaps 
fine fancies for a critic to weave about a literary figure 



128 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

of whom he has undertaken to give a plain account; 
but I leave them so on the plea that there are rela- 
tions in which, for the Balzacian, criticism simply 
drops out. That is not a liberty, I admit, ever to be 
much encouraged; critics in fact are the only people 
who have a right occasionally to take it. There is no 
such plain account of the Comedie Humaine as that 
it makes us fold up our yard-measure and put away 
our note-book quite as we do with some extraordinary 
character, some mysterious and various stranger, who 
brings with him his own standards and his own air. 
There is a kind of eminent presence that abashes even 
the interviewer, moves him to respect and wonder, 
makes him, for consideration itself, not insist. This 
takes of course a personage sole of his kind. But 
such a personage precisely is Balzac. 

Ill 

By all of which have I none the less felt it but too 
clear that I must not pretend in this place to take 
apart the pieces of his immense complicated work, to 
number them or group them or dispose them about. 
The most we can do is to pick one up here and there 
and wonder, as we weigh it in our hand, at its close 
compact substance. That is all even M. Taine could 
do in the longest and most penetrating study of which 
our author has been the subject. Every piece we han- 
dle is so full of stuff, condensed like the edibles pro- 
vided for campaigns and explorations, positively so 
charged with distilled life, that we find ourselves drop- 
ping it, in certain states of sensibility, as we drop an 
object unguardedly touched that startles us by being 
animate. We seem really scarce to want anything 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 129 

to be so animate. It would verily take Balzac to de- 
tail Balzac, and he has had in fact Balzacians nearly 
enough affiliated to affront the task with courage. 
The " Repertoire de la Comedie Humaine ,, of MM. 
Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Christophe is a closely- 
printed octavo of 550 pages which constitutes in rela- 
tion to his characters great and small an impeccable 
biographical dictionary. His votaries and expositors 
are so numerous that the Balzac library of com- 
ment and research must be, of its type, one of the 
most copious. M. de Lovenjoul has laboured all 
round the subject; his "Histoire des CEuvres" alone 
is another crowded octavo of 400 pages; in connection 
with which I must mention Miss Wormeley, the de- 
voted American translator, interpreter, worshipper, 
who in the course of her own studies has so often 
found occasion to differ from M. de Lovenjoul on mat- 
ters of fact and questions of date and of appreciation. 
Miss Wormeley, M. Paul Bourget and many others 
are examples of the passionate piety that our author 
can inspire. As I turn over the encyclopedia of his 
characters I note that whereas such works usually 
commemorate but the ostensibly eminent of a race 
and time, every creature so much as named in the 
fictive swarm is in this case preserved to fame: so 
close is the implication that to have been named by 
such a dispenser of life and privilege is to be, as we say 
it of baronets and peers, created. He infinitely divided 
moreover, as we know, he subdivided, altered and 
multiplied his heads and categories — his "Vie Pari- 
sienne," his "Vie de Province," his "Vie Politique," his 
"Parents Pauvres," his "Etudes Philosophiques," his 
"Splendeurs et Miseres des Courtisanes," his "Envers 
de l'Histoire Contemporaine" and all the rest; so that 



i 3 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

nominal reference to them becomes the more difficult. 
Yet without prejudice either to the energy of concep- 
tion with which he mapped out his theme as with 
chalk on a huge blackboard, or to the prodigious pa- 
tience with which he executed his plan, practically 
filling in with a wealth of illustration, from sources 
that to this day we fail to make out, every compart- 
ment of his table, M. de Lovenjoul draws up the list, 
year by year, from 1822 to 1848, of his mass of work, 
giving us thus the measure of the tension represented 
for him by almost any twelvemonth. It is wholly 
unequalled, considering the quality of Balzac's show, 
by any other eminent abundance. 

I must be pardoned for coming back to it, for seem- 
ing unable to leave it; it enshrouds so interesting a 
mystery. How was so solidly systematic a literary 
attack on life to be conjoined with whatever workable 
minimum of needful intermission, of free observation, 
of personal experience ? Some small possibility of per- 
sonal experience and disinterested life must, at the 
worst, from deep within or far without, feed and fortify 
the strained productive machine. These things were 
luxuries that Balzac appears really never to have tasted 
on any appreciable scale. His published letters — the 
driest and most starved of those of any man of equal 
distinction — are with the exception of those to Madame 
de Hanska, whom he married shortly before his death, 
almost exclusively the audible wail of a galley-slave 
chained to the oar. M. Zola, in our time, among the 
novelists, has sacrificed to the huge plan in something 
of the same manner, yet with goodly modern differences 
that leave him a comparatively simple instance. His 
work assuredly has been more nearly dried up by the 



HONORE DE BALZAC 131 

sacrifice than ever Balzac's was — so miraculously, 
given the conditions, was Balzac's to escape the anti- 
climax. Method and system, in the chronicle of the 
tribe of Rougon-Macquart, an economy in itself cer- 
tainly of the rarest and most interesting, have spread 
so from centre to circumference that they have ended 
by being almost the only thing we feel. And then 
M. Zola has survived and triumphed in his lifetime, 
has continued and lasted, has piled up and, if the 
remark be not frivolous, enjoyed in all its agrements 
the reward for which Balzac toiled and sweated in 
vain. On top of which he will have had also his 
literary great-grandfather's heroic example to start 
from and profit by, the positive heritage of a fils de 
famille to enjoy, spend, save, waste. Balzac had 
frankly no heritage at all but his stiff subject, and by 
way of model not even in any direct or immediate 
manner that of the inner light and kindly admonition 
of his genius. Nothing adds more to the strangeness 
of his general performance than his having failed so 
long to find his inner light, groped for it almost ten 
years, missed it again and again, moved straight away 
from it, turned his back on it, lived in fine round about 
it, in a darkness still scarce penetrable, a darkness into 
which we peep only half to make out the dreary little 
waste of his numerous ceuvres de jeunesse. To M. Zola 
was vouchsafed the good fortune of settling down to the 
Rougon-Macquart with the happiest promptitude; it 
was as if time for one look about him — and I say it 
without disparagement to the reach of his look — had 
sufficiently served his purpose, Balzac moreover might 
have written five hundred novels without our feeling 
in him the faintest hint of the breath of doom, if he 
had only been comfortably capable of conceiving the 



132 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

short cut of the fashion practised by others under his 
eyes. As Alexandre Dumas and George Sand, illus- 
trious contemporaries, cultivated a personal life and 
a disinterested consciousness by the bushel, having, for 
their easier duration, not too consistently known, as 
the true painter knows it, the obsession of the thing to 
be done, so Balzac was condemned by his constitution 
itself, by his inveterately seeing this "thing to be done" 
as part and parcel, as of the very essence, of his enter- 
prise. The latter existed for him, as the process worked 
and hallucination settled, in the form, and the form 
only, of the thing done, and not in any hocus-pocus 
about doing. There was no kindly convenient escape 
for him by the little swinging back-door of the thing 
not done. He desired — no man more — to get out of 
his obsession, but only at the other end, that is by 
boring through it. "How then, thus deprived of the 
outer air almost as much as if he were gouging a pas- 
sage for a railway through an Alp, did he live i" is the 
question that haunts us — with the consequence for 
the most part of promptly meeting its fairly tragic 
answer. He did not live — save in his imagination, or 
by other aid than he could find there; his imagination 
was all his experience; he had provably no time for 
the real thing. This brings us to the rich if simple 
truth that his imagination alone did the business, car- 
ried through both the conception and the execution — 
as large an effort and as proportionate a success, in all 
but the vulgar sense, as the faculty when equally 
handicapped was ever concerned in. Handicapped I 
say because this interesting fact about him, with the 
claim it makes, rests on the ground, the high distinc- 
tion, that more than all the rest of us put together he 
went in, as we say, for detail, circumstance and spec- 






HONORfi DE BALZAC 133 

ification, proposed to himself all the connections of 
every part of his matter and the full total of the parts. 
The whole thing, it is impossible not to keep repeating, 
was what he deemed treatable. One really knows in 
all imaginative literature no undertaking to compare 
with it for courage, good faith and sublimity. There, 
once more, was the necessity that rode him and that 
places him apart in our homage. It is no light thing 
to have been condemned to become provably sublime. 
And looking through, or trying to, at what is beneath 
and behind, we are left benevolently uncertain if the 
predominant quantity be audacity or innocence. 

It is of course inevitable at this point to seem to hear 
the colder critic promptly take us up. He undertook 
the whole thing — oh exactly, the ponderous person ! 
But did he "do" the whole thing, if you please, any 
more than sundry others of fewer pretensions ? The 
retort to this it can only be a positive joy to make, so 
high a note instantly sounds as an effect of the inquiry. 
Nothing is more interesting and amusing than to find 
one's self recognising both that Balzac's pretensions 
were immense, portentous, and that yet, taking him 
— and taking them — altogether, they but minister in 
the long run to our fondness. They affect us not only 
as the endearing eccentricities of a person we greatly 
admire, but fairly as the very condition of his having 
become such a person. We take them thus in the first 
place for the very terms of his plan, and in the second 
for a part of that high robustness and that general 
richness of nature which made him in face of such a 
project believe in himself. One would really scarce 
have liked to see such a job as La Comedie Humaine 
tackled without swagger. To think of the thing 



134 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

really as practicable was swagger, and of the very 
rarest order. So to think assuredly implied pretensions, 
pretensions that risked showing as monstrous should 
the enterprise fail to succeed. It is for the colder 
critic to take the trouble to make out that of the two 
parties to it the body of pretension remains greater 
than the success. One may put it moreover at the 
worst for him, may recognise that it is in the matter 
of opinion still more than in the matter of knowledge 
that Balzac offers himself as universally competent. 
He has flights of judgment — on subjects the most 
special as well as the most general — that are vertig- 
inous and on his alighting from which we greet him 
with a special indulgence. We can easily imagine 
him to respond, confessing humorously — if he had only 
time — to such a benevolent understanding smile as 
would fain hold our own eyes a moment. Then it is 
that he would most show us his scheme and his neces- 
sities and how in operation they all hang together. 
Naturally everything about everything, though how 
he had time to learn it is the last thing he has time to 
tell us; which matters the less, moreover, as it is not 
over the question of his knowledge that we sociably 
invite him, as it were (and remembering the two augurs 
behind the altar) to wink at us for a sign. His con- 
victions it is that are his great pardonable "swagger"; 
to them in particular I refer as his general operative 
condition, the constituted terms of his experiment, 
and not less as his consolation, his support, his amuse- 
ment by the way. They embrace everything in the 
world — that is in his world of the so parti-coloured 
France of his age: religion, morals, politics, economics, 
physics, esthetics, letters, art, science, sociology, every 
question of faith, every branch of research. They 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 135 

represent thus his equipment of ideas, those ideas of 
which it will never do for a man who aspires to con- 
stitute a State to be deprived. He must take them 
with him as an ambassador extraordinary takes with 
him secretaries, uniforms, stars and garters, a gilded 
coach and a high assurance. Balzac's opinions are 
his gilded coach, in which he is more amused than any- 
thing else to feel himself riding, but which is indispen- 
sably concerned in getting him over the ground. 
What more inevitable than that they should be in- 
tensely Catholic, intensely monarchical, intensely sat- 
urated with the real genius — as between 1830 and 1848 
he believed it to be — of the French character and 
French institutions ? 

Nothing is happier for us than that he should have 
enjoyed his outlook before the first half of the century 
closed. He could then still treat his subject as com- 
paratively homogeneous. Any country could have a 
Revolution — every country had had one. A Resto- 
ration was merely what a revolution involved, and the 
Empire had been for the French but a revolutionary 
incident, in addition to being by good luck for the 
novelist an immensely pictorial one. He was free 
therefore to arrange the background of the comedy 
in the manner that seemed to him best to suit anything 
so great; in the manner at the same time prescribed 
according to his contention by the noblest traditions. 
The church, the throne, the noblesse, the bourgeoisie, 
the people, the peasantry, all in their order and each 
solidly kept in it, these were precious things, things 
his superabundant insistence on the price of which is 
what I refer to as his exuberance of opinion. It was 
a luxury for more reasons than one, though one, 



1 3 6 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

presently to be mentioned, handsomely predominates. 
The meaning of that exchange of intelligences in the 
rear of the oracle which I have figured for him with 
the perceptive friend bears simply on his pleading 
guilty to the purport of the friend's discrimination. 
The point the latter makes with him — a beautiful 
cordial critical point — is that he truly cares for noth- 
ing in the world, thank goodness, so much as for the 
passions and embroilments of men and women, the 
free play of character and the sharp revelation of type, 
all the real stuff of drama and the natural food of 
novelists. Religion, morals, politics, economics, es- 
thetics would be thus, as systematic matter, very well 
in their place, but quite secondary and subservient. 
Balzac's attitude is again and again that he cares for 
the adventures and emotions because, as his last word, 
he cares for the good and the greatness of the State — 
which is where his swagger, with a whole society on his 
hands, comes in. What we on our side in a thousand 
places gratefully feel is that he cares for his monarchi- 
cal and hierarchical and ecclesiastical society because 
it rounds itself for his mind into the most congruous 
and capacious theatre for the repertory of his innu- 
merable comedians. It has above all, for a painter 
abhorrent of the superficial, the inestimable benefit 
of the accumulated, of strong marks and fine shades, 
contrasts and complications. There had certainly 
been since 1789 dispersals and confusions enough, but 
the thick tradition, no more at the most than half 
smothered, lay under them all. So the whole of his 
faith and no small part of his working omniscience 
were neither more nor less than that historic sense 
which I have spoken of as the spur of his invention 
and which he possessed as no other novelist has done. 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 137 

We immediately feel that to name it in connection 
with him is to answer every question he suggests and 
to account for each of his idiosyncrasies in turn. The 
novel, the tale, however brief, the passage, the sentence 
by itself, the situation, the person, the place, the mo- 
tive exposed, the speech reported — these things were 
in his view history, with the absoluteness and the 
dignity of history. This is the source both of his 
weight and of his wealth. What is the historic sense 
after all but animated, but impassioned knowledge 
seeking to enlarge itself? I have said that his imag- 
ination did the whole thing, no other explanation — no 
reckoning of the possibilities of personal saturation — 
meeting the mysteries of the case. Therefore his 
imagination achieved the miracle of absolutely resolv- 
ing itself into multifarious knowledge. Since history 
proceeds by documents he constructed, as he needed 
them, the documents too — fictive sources that imitated 
the actual to the life. It was of course a terrible bus- 
iness, but at least in the light of it his claims to creator- 
ship are justified — which is what was to be shown. 

IV 

It is very well even in the sketchiest attempt at a 
portrait of his genius to try to take particulars in their 
order: one peeps over the shoulder of another at the 
moment we get a feature into focus. The loud appeal 
not to be left out prevails among them all, and certainly 
with the excuse that each as we fix it seems to fall 
most into the picture. I have so indulged myself as 
to his general air that I find a whole list of vivid con- 
tributive marks almost left on my hands. Such a list, 
in any study of Balzac, is delightful for intimate 



i 3 8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

edification as well as for the fine humour of the thing; 
we proceed from one of the items of his breathing 
physiognomy to the other with quite the same sense 
of life, the same active curiosity, with which we push 
our way through the thick undergrowth of one of the 
novels. The difficulty is really that the special point 
for which we at the moment observe him melts into 
all the other points, is swallowed up before our eyes in 
the formidable mass. The French apply the happiest 
term to certain characters when they speak of them 
as entiers, and if the word had been invented for Balzac 
it could scarce better have expressed him. He is 
"entire" as was never a man of his craft; he moves 
always in his mass; wherever we find him we find him 
in force; whatever touch he applies he applies it with 
his whole apparatus. He is like an army gathered to 
besiege a cottage equally with a city, and living vo- 
raciously in either case on all the country about. It 
may well be, at any rate, that his infatuation with the 
idea of the social, the practical primacy of "the sex" 
is the article at the top of one's list; there could cer- 
tainly be no better occasion than this of a rich reissue 
of the "Deux Jeunes Mariees" for placing it there at 
a venture. Here indeed precisely we get a sharp ex- 
ample of the way in which, as I have just said, a capital 
illustration of one of his sides becomes, just as we take 
it up, a capital illustration of another. The corre- 
spondence of Louise de Chaulieu and Renee de Mau- 
combe is in fact one of those cases that light up with 
a great golden glow all his parts at once. We needn't 
mean by this that such parts are themselves absolutely 
all golden — given the amount of tinsel for instance in 
his view, supereminent, transcendent here, of the old 
families and the great ladies. What we do convey, 



HONORE DE BALZAC 139 

however, is that his creative temperament finds in such 
data as these one of its best occasions for shining out. 
Again we fondly recognise his splendid, his attaching 
swagger — that of a "bounder" of genius and of feeling; 
again we see how, with opportunity, its elements may 
vibrate into a perfect ecstasy of creation. 

Why shouldn't a man swagger, he treats us to the 
diversion of asking ourselves, who has created from top 
to toe the most brilliant, the most historic, the most 
insolent, above all the most detailed and discriminated 
of aristocracies ? Balzac carried the uppermost class 
of his comedy, from the princes, dukes, and unspeak- 
able duchesses down to his poor barons de province, 
about in his pocket as he might have carried a tolerably 
befingered pack of cards, to deal them about with a 
flourish of the highest authority whenever there was 
the chance of a game. He knew them up and down 
and in and out, their arms, infallibly supplied, their 
quarterings, pedigrees, services, intermarriages, rela- 
tionships, ramifications and other enthralling attributes. 
This indeed is comparatively simple learning; the real 
wonder is rather when we linger on the ground of the 
patrician consciousness itself, the innermost, the 
esoteric, the spirit, temper, tone — tone above all — of 
the titled and the proud. The questions multiply for 
every scene of the comedy; there is no one who makes 
us walk in such a cloud of them. The clouds else- 
where, in comparison, are at best of questions not 
worth asking. Was the patrician consciousness that 
figured as our author's model so splendidly fatuous as 
he — almost without irony, often in fact with a certain 
poetic sympathy — everywhere represents it ? His im- 
agination lives in it, breathes its scented air, swallows 



i 4 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

this element with the smack of the lips of the con- 
noisseur; but I feel that we never know, even to the 
end, whether he be here directly historic or only quite 
misguidedly romantic. The romantic side of him has 
the extent of all the others; it represents in the oddest 
manner his escape from the walled and roofed struc- 
ture into which he had built himself — his longing for 
the vaguely-felt outside and as much as might be of the 
rest of the globe. But it is characteristic of him that 
the most he could do for this relief was to bring the 
fantastic into the circle and fit it somehow to his con- 
ditions. Was his tone for the duchess, the marquise 
but the imported fantastic, one of those smashes of 
the window-pane of the real that reactions sometimes 
produce even in the stubborn ? or are we to take it as 
observed, as really reported, as, for all its difference 
from our notion of the natural — and, quite as much, 
of the artificial — in another and happier strain of man- 
ners, substantially true? The whole episode, in "Les 
Illusions Perdues," of Madame de Bargeton's "chuck- 
ing" Lucien de Rubempre, on reaching Paris with 
him, under pressure of Madame d'Espard's shock- 
ability as to his coat and trousers and other such mat- 
ters, is either a magnificent lurid document or the 
baseless fabric of a vision. The great wonder is that, 
as I rejoice to put it, we can never really discover 
which, and that we feel as we read that we can't, and 
that we suffer at the hands of no other author this par- 
ticular helplessness of immersion. It is done — we are 
always thrown back on that; we can't get out of it; 
all we can do is to say that the true itself can't be more 
than done and that if the false in this way equals it 
we must give up looking for the difference. Alone 
among novelists Balzac has the secret of an insistence 
that somehow makes the difference nought. He 



HONORS DE BALZAC 141 

warms his facts into life — as witness the certainty that 
the episode I just cited has absolutely as much of that 
property as if perfect matching had been achieved. 
If the great ladies in question didnt behave, wouldn't, 
couldn't have behaved, like a pair of nervous snobs, 
why so much the worse, we say to ourselves, for the 
great ladies in question. We know them so — they owe 
their being to our so seeing them; whereas we never 
can tell ourselves how we should otherwise have known 
them or what quantity of being they would on a dif- 
ferent footing have been able to put forth. 

The case is the same with Louise de Chaulieu, who 
besides coming out of her convent school, as a quite 
young thing, with an amount of sophistication that 
would have chilled the heart of a horse-dealer, exhales 
— and to her familiar friend, a young person of a sup- 
posedly equal breeding — an extravagance of com- 
placency in her "social position'' that makes us rub 
our eyes. Whereupon after a little the same phenom- 
enon occurs; we swallow her bragging, against our 
better reason, or at any rate against our startled sense, 
under coercion of the total intensity. We do more 
than this, we cease to care for the question, which 
loses itself in the hot fusion of the whole picture. He 
has "gone for" his subject, in the vulgar phrase, with 
an avidity that makes the attack of his most eminent 
rivals affect us as the intercourse between introduced 
indifferences at a dull evening party. He squeezes it 
till it cries out, we hardly know whether for pleasure 
or pain. In the case before us for example — without 
wandering from book to book, impossible here, I make 
the most of the ground already broken — he has seen at 
once that the state of marriage itself, sounded to its 
depths, is, in the connection, his real theme. . He sees 



i 4 2 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

it of course in the conditions that exist for him, but he 
weighs it to the last ounce, feels it in all its dimensions, 
as well as in all his own, and would scorn to take refuge 
in any engaging side-issue. He gets, for further in- 
tensity, into the very skin of his jeunes mariees — into 
each alternately, as they are different enough; so that, 
to repeat again, any other mode of representing women, 
or of representing anybody, becomes, in juxtaposition, 
a thing so void of the active contortions of truth 
as to be comparatively wooden. He bears children 
with Madame de l'Estorade, knows intimately how she 
suffers for them, and not less intimately how her cor- 
respondent suffers, as well as enjoys, without them. 
Big as he is he makes himself small to be handled by 
her with young maternal passion and positively to 
handle her in turn with infantile innocence. These 
things are the very flourishes, the little technical 
amusements of his penetrating power. But it is doubt- 
less in his hand for such a matter as the jealous passion 
of Louise de Chaulieu, the free play of her intelligence 
and the almost beautiful good faith of her egotism, 
that he is most individual. It is one of the neatest 
examples of his extraordinary leading gift, his art — 
which is really moreover not an art — of working the 
exhibition of a given character up to intensity. I say 
it is not an art because it acts for us rather as a hunger 
on the part of his nature to take on in all freedom 
another nature — take it by a direct process of the 
senses. Art is for the mass of us who have only the 
process of art, comparatively so stiff. The thing 
amounts with him to a kind of shameless personal, 
physical, not merely intellectual, duality — the very 
spirit and secret of transmigration. 



HONORE DE BALZAC 

1913 

It is a pleasure to meet M. Emile Faguet 1 on the same 
ground of mastered critical method and in the same 
air of cool deliberation and conclusion that so favoured 
his excellent study of Flaubert in the rich series to 
which the present volume belongs. It was worth 
while waiting these many years for a Balzac to get it 
at last from a hand of so firm a grip, if not quite of the 
very finest manipulative instinct. It can scarce ever 
be said of M. Faguet that he tends to play with a 
subject, at least a literary one; but nobody is better 
for circling his theme in sound and easy pedestrian 
fashion, for taking up each of its aspects in order, for 
a sense, above all, of the order in which they should 
be taken, and for then, after doing them successively 
justice, reaching the point from which they appear 
to melt together. He thus gives us one of those lit- 
erary portraits the tradition of which, so far at least as 
they are the fruit of method, has continued scantily 
to flourish among ourselves. We cannot help thinking 
indeed that an ideally authoritative portrait of Balzac 
would be the work of some pondering painter able to 
measure the great man's bequest a little more from 
within or by a coincidence of special faculty, or that 
in other words the particular initiation and fellow- 

1 Balzac. Par Emile Faguet, de l'Academie Francaise. Les Grands 
Ecrivains Francais. Paris, Hachette, 191 3. 

143 



i 4 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

feeling of some like — that is not too unlike — imagina- 
tive projector as well are rather wanted here to warm 
and colour the critical truth to the right glow of appre- 
ciation. Which comes to saying, we quite acknowledge, 
that a "tribute" to Balzac, of however embracing an 
intention, may still strike us as partly unachieved if 
we fail to catch yearning and shining through it, like 
a motive in a musical mixture or a thread of gold in a 
piece of close weaving, the all but overriding sympathy 
of novelist with novelist. M. Faguet's intelligence at 
any rate sweeps his ground clear of the anecdotal, 
the question-begging reference to odds and ends of 
the personal and superficial, in a single short chapter, 
and, having got so promptly over this second line of 
defence, attacks at once the issue of his author's gen- 
eral ideas — matters apt to be, in any group of con- 
tributors to a "series" of our own, exactly what the 
contributor most shirks considering. 

It is true that few writers, and especially few novel- 
ists, bring up that question with anything like the 
gross assurance and systematic confidence of Balzac, 
who clearly took for involved in his plan of a complete 
picture of the manners and aspects of his country 
and his period that he should have his confident "say" 
about as many things as possible, and who, through- 
out his immense work, appears never for an instant or 
in any connection to flinch from that complacency. 
Here it is easy to await him, waylay him and catch 
him in the act, with the consequence, for the most 
part, of our having to recognise almost with compas- 
sion the disparity between the author of "La Cousine 
Bette" exercising his genius, as Matthew Arnold said 
of Ruskin, in making a like distinction, and the same 



HONORS DE BALZAC 145 

writer taking on a character not in the least really 
rooted in that soil. The fact none the less than his 
generalising remains throughout so markedly inferior to 
his particularising — which latter element and very es- 
sence of the novelist's art it was his greatness to carry 
further and apply more consistently than any member 
of the craft, without exception, has felt the impulse, 
to say nothing of finding the way, to do — by no means 
wholly destroys the interest of the habit itself or re- 
lieves us of a due attention to it; so characteristic and 
significant, so suggestive even of his special force, 
though in a manner indirect, are the very folds and 
redundancies of this philosopher's robe that flaps 
about his feet and drags along the ground like an 
assumed official train. The interest here — where it 
is exactly that a whole face of his undertaking would 
be most illumined for the fellow-artist we imagine 
trying to exhibit him — depends much less on what 
his reflection and opinion, his irrepressible obiter dicta 
and monstrous suffisances of judgment may be, than 
on the part played in his scheme by his holding himself 
ready at every turn and at such short notice to judge. 
For this latter fact probably lights up more than any 
other his conception of the range of the novel, the 
fashion after which, in his hands, it had been felt as an 
all-inclusive form, a form without rift or leak, a tight 
mould, literally, into which everything relevant to a 
consideration of the society surrounding him — and 
the less relevant unfortunately, as well as the more 
— might be poured in a stream of increasing consis- 
tency, the underlapping subject stretched, all so for- 
midably, to its own constituted edge and the com- 
pound appointed to reproduce, as in finest and subtlest 
relief, its every minutest feature, overlying and corre- 



146 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

sponding with it all round to the loss of no fraction of 
an inch. 

It is thus the painter's aspiring and rejoicing con- 
sciousness of the great square swarming picture, the 
picture of France from side to side and from top to 
bottom, which he proposes to copy — unless we see 
the collective quantity rather as the vast primary 
model or sitter that he is unprecedentedly to portray, 
it is this that, rendering him enviable in proportion 
to his audacity and his presumption, gives a dignity 
to everything that makes the consciousness whole. 
The result is a state of possession of his material unlike 
that of any other teller of tales whatever about a cir- 
cumjacent world, and the process of his gain of which 
opens up well-nigh the first of those more or less baf- 
fling questions, parts indeed of the great question of 
the economic rule, the practical secret, of his activity, 
that beset us as soon as we study him. To fit what he 
was and what he did, that is the measure of how he 
used himself and how he used every one and every- 
thing else, into his after all so brief career (for twenty 
years cover the really productive term of it) is for 
ourselves, we confess, to renounce any other solution 
than that of his having proceeded by a sense for facts, 
the multitudinous facts of the scene about him, that 
somehow involved a preliminary, a pre-experiential 
inspiration, a straightness of intuition truly impossible 
to give an account of and the like of which had never 
before been shown. He had not to learn things in 
order to know them; and even though he multiplied 
himself in more ways than we can reckon up, going 
hither and thither geographically, leading his life with 
violence, as it were, though always with intention, and 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 147 

wasting almost nothing that had ever touched him, 
the natural man, the baptised and registered Honore, 
let loose with harsh promptitude upon a world formed 
from the first moment to excite his voracity, can only 
have been all the exploiting agent, the pushing inquirer, 
the infallible appraiser, the subject of an arriere-pensee 
as merciless, in spite of being otherwise genial, as the 
black care riding behind the horseman. There was 
thus left over for him less of mere human looseness, 
of mere emotion, of mere naturalness, or of any cu- 
riosity whatever, that didn't "pay" — and the extent 
to which he liked things to pay, to see them, think of 
them, and describe them as prodigiously paying, is 
not to be expressed — than probably marks any re- 
corded relation between author and subject as we 
know each of these terms. 

So it comes that his mastership of whatever given 
identity might be in question, and much more of the 
general identity of his rounded (for the artistic vision), 
his compact and containing France, the fixed, felt 
frame to him of the vividest items and richest char- 
acteristics of human life, can really not be thought of 
as a matter of degrees of confidence, as acquired or 
built up or cumbered with verifying fears. He was 
the given identity and, on the faintest shade of a hint 
about it caught up, became one with it and lived it — 
this in the only way in which he could live, anywhere 
or at any time: which was by losing himself in its 
relation to his need or to what we call his voracity. 
Just so his mind, his power of apprehension, worked 
naturally in the interest of a society disclosed to that 
appetite; on the mere approach to the display he in- 
haled information, he recognised himself as what he 



148 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

might best be known for, an historian unprecedented, 
an historian documented as none had not only ever 
been, but had ever dreamed of being — and even if the 
method of his documentation can leave us for the most 
part but wondering. The method of his use of it, or 
of a portion of it, we more or less analyse and measure; 
but the wealth of his provision or outfit itself, the 
crammed store of his categories and cadres, leaves us 
the more stupefied as we feel it to have been honestly 
come by. All this is what it is impossible not to regard 
as in itself a fundamental felicity such as no confrere 
had known; so far, indeed, as Balzac suffered con- 
freres or as the very nature of his faculty could be 
thought of for them. M. Brunetiere's monograph of 
some years ago, which is but a couple of degrees less 
weighty, to our sense, than this of M. Faguet before us, 
justly notes that, whatever other felicity may have 
graced the exercise of such a genius, for instance, as 
that rare contemporary George Sand, she was reduced 
well-nigh altogether to drawing upon resources and 
enjoying advantages comparatively vague and unas- 
sured. She had of course in a manner her special re- 
source and particular advantage, which consisted, so 
to speak, in a finer feeling about what she did possess 
and could treat of with authority, and particularly in 
a finer command of the terms of expression, than any 
involved in Balzac's "happier" example. But her 
almost fatal weakness as a novelist — an exponent of 
the art who has waned exactly as, for our general 
long-drawn appreciation, Balzac has waxed — comes 
from her having had to throw herself upon ground 
that no order governed, no frame, as we have said, 
enclosed, and no safety attended; safety of the sort, 
we mean, the safety of the constitutive, illustrative 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 149 

fact among facts, which we find in her rival as a warm 
socialised air, an element supremely assimilable. 

It may freely be pronounced interesting that 
whereas, in her instinct for her highest security, she 
threw herself upon the consideration of love as the 
type attraction or most representable thing in the 
human scene, so, assuredly, no student of that field 
has, in proportion to the thoroughness of his study, 
felt he could afford to subordinate or almost even to 
neglect it to anything like the tune in which we see it 
put and kept in its place through the parts of the 
Comedie Humaine that most count. If this passion 
but too often exhales a tepid breath in much other 
fiction — much other of ours at least — that is apt to 
come decidedly less from the writer's sense of pro- 
portion than from his failure of art, or in other words 
of intensity. It is rarely absent by intention or by 
intelligence, it is pretty well always there as the theo- 
retic principal thing — any difference from writer to 
writer being mostly in the power to put the principal 
thing effectively forward. It figures as a pressing, an 
indispensable even if a perfunctory motive, for example, 
in every situation devised by Walter Scott; the case 
being simply that if it doesn't in fact attractively 
occupy the foreground this is because his hand has had 
so native, so much greater, an ease for other parts of 
the picture. What makes Balzac so pre-eminent and 
exemplary that he was to leave the novel a far other and 
a vastly more capacious and significant affair than he 
found it, is his having felt his fellow-creatures (almost 
altogether for him his contemporaries) as quite failing 
of reality, as swimming in the vague and the void and 
the abstract, unless their social conditions, to the last 



i 5 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

particular, their generative and contributive circum- 
stances, of every discernible sort, enter for all these 
are "worth" into his representative attempt. This 
great compound of the total looked into and starting 
up in its element, as it always does, to meet the eye 
of genius and patience half way, bristled for him with 
all its branching connections, those thanks to which 
any figure could be a figure but by showing for endlessly 
entangled in them. 

So it was then that his huge felicity, to re-empha- 
sise our term, was in his state of circulating where 
recognitions and identifications didn't so much await 
as rejoicingly assault him, having never yet in all the 
world, grudged or at the best suspected feeders as they 
were at the board where sentiment occupied the head, 
felt themselves so finely important or subject to such a 
worried intention. They hung over a scene as to which 
it was one of the forces of his inspiration that his- 
tory had lately been there at work, with incomparable 
energy and inimitable art, to pile one upon another, 
not to say squeeze and dovetail violently into each 
other, after such a fashion as might defy competition 
anywhere, her successive deposits and layers of form 
and order, her restless determinations of appearance 
— so like those of the different "states" of an engraver's 
impression; all to an effect which should have con- 
stituted, as by a miracle of coincidence it did, the 
paradise of an extraordinary observer. Balzac lived 
accordingly, extraordinary since he was, in an earthly 
heaven so near perfect for his kind of vision that he 
could have come at no moment more conceivably blest 
to him. The later part of the eighteenth century, 
with the Revolution, the Empire and the Restoration, 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 151 

had inimitably conspired together to scatter abroad 
their separate marks and stigmas, their separate trails 
of character and physiognomic hits — for which advan- 
tage he might have arrived too late, as his hapless suc- 
cessors, even his more or less direct imitators, visibly 
have done. The fatal fusions and uniformities in- 
flicted on our newer generations, the running together 
of all the differences of form and tone, the ruinous 
liquefying wash of the great industrial brush over the 
old conditions of contrast and colour, doubtless still 
have left the painter of manners much to do, but have 
ground him down to the sad fact that his ideals of dif- 
ferentiation, those inherent oppositions from type to 
type, in which drama most naturally resides, have 
well-nigh perished. They pant for life in a hostile air; 
and we may surely say that their last successful strug- 
gle, their last bright resistance to eclipse among our- 
selves, was in their feverish dance to the great fiddling 
of Dickens. Dickens made them dance, we seem to 
see, caper and kick their heels, wave their arms, and 
above all agitate their features, for the simple reason 
that he couldn't make them stand or sit at once quietly 
and expressively, couldn't make them look straight out 
as for themselves — quite in fact as through his not 
daring to, not feeling he could afford to, in a changing 
hour when ambiguities and the wavering line, droll 
and "dodgy" dazzlements and the possibly undetected 
factitious alone, might be trusted to keep him right 
with an incredibly uncritical public, a public blind to 
the difference between a shade and a patch. 

Balzac on the other hand, born as we have seen to 
confidence, the tonic air of his paradise, might make 
character, in the sense in which we use it, that of the 



152 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

element exposable to the closest verification, sit or 
stand for its "likeness" as still as ever it would. It is 
true that he could, as he often did, resort to fond ex- 
travagance, since he was apt at his worst to plunge 
into agitation for mere agitation's sake — which is a 
course that, by any turn, may cast the plunger on the 
barrenest strand. But he is at his best when the con- 
ditions, the whole complex of subdivisible form and 
pressure, are virtually themselves the situation, the 
action and the interest, or in other words when these 
things exhaust themselves, as it were, in expressing 
the persons we are concerned with, agents and victims 
alike, and when by such vivified figures, whether vic- 
tims or agents, they are themselves completely ex- 
pressed. The three distinguished critics who have 
best studied him, Taine, Brunetiere and now (as well 
as before this) M. Faguet — the first the most eloquent 
but the loosest, and the last the closest even if the 
dryest — are in agreement indeed as to the vast quantity 
of waste in him, inevitably judging the romanticist as 
whom he so frequently, speculatively, desperately 
paraded altogether inferior to the realist whose func- 
tion he could still repeatedly and richly and for his 
greater glory exercise. This estimate of his partic- 
ularly greater glory is of a truth not wholly shared by 
M. Taine; but the three are virtually at one, where 
we of course join them, or rather go further than they, 
as to the enviability, so again to call it (and by which we 
mean the matchless freedom of play), of his harvest- 
ing sense when he gave himself up in fullest measure 
to his apprehension of the dense wholeness of reality. 
It was this that led him on and kept him true to that 
happily largest side of his labour by which he must 
massively live; just as it is this, the breath of his real 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 153 

geniality, when every abatement is made, that stirs 
to loyalty those who under his example also take his 
direction and find their joy in watching him thoroughly 
at work. We see then how, when social character 
and evolved type are the prize to be grasped, the facts 
of observation and certification, unrestingly social and 
historic too, that form and fondle and retouch it, 
never relaxing their action, are so easily and blessedly 
absolute to him that this is what we mean by their 
virtue. 

When there were enough of these quantities and 
qualities flowering into the definite and the absolute 
for him to feed on, feed if not to satiety at least to the 
largest loosening of his intellectual belt, there were 
so many that we may even fall in with most of M. 
Faguet's discriminations and reserves about him and 
yet find his edifice rest on proportioned foundations. 
For it is his assimilation of things and things, of his 
store of them and of the right ones, the right for repre- 
sentation, that leaves his general image, even with 
great chunks of surface surgically, that is critically, 
removed, still coherent and erect. There are mo- 
ments when M. Faguet — most surgical he ! — seems to 
threaten to remove so much that we ask ourselves in 
wonder what may be left; but no removal matters 
while the principle of observation animating the mass 
is left unattacked. Our present critic for instance is 
"down" — very understandingly down as seems to us 
— on some of the sides of his author's rich temper- 
amental vulgarity; which is accompanied on those 
sides by want of taste, want of wit, want of style, want 
of knowledge of ever so many parts of the general sub- 
ject, too precipitately proposed, and want of fineness 



i 54 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

of feeling about ever so many others. We agree with 
him freely enough, subject always to this reserve 
already glanced at, that a novelist of a high esthetic 
sensibility must always find more in any other novelist 
worth considering seriously at all than he can perhaps 
hope to impart even to the most intelligent of critics 
pure and simple his subtle reasons for. This said, 
we lose ourselves, to admiration, in such a matter for 
example as the tight hug of the mere material, the 
supremely important if such ever was, represented by 
the appeal to us on behalf of the money-matters of 
Cesar Birotteau. 

This illustration gains logically, much more than 
loses, from the rank predominance of the money-ques- 
tion, the money-vision, throughout all Balzac. There 
are lights in which it can scarce not appear to us that 
his own interest is greater, his possibilities of attention 
truer, in these pressing particulars than in all other 
questions put together; there could be no better sign 
of the appreciation of "things," exactly, than so never 
relaxed a grasp of the part played in the world by just 
these. Things for things, the franc, the shilling, the 
dollar, are the very most underlying and conditioning, 
even dramatically, even poetically, that call upon him; 
and we have everywhere to recognise how little he 
feels himself to be telling us of this, that and the 
other person unless he has first given us full informa- 
tion, with every detail, either as to their private means, 
their income, investments, savings, losses, the state 
in fine of their pockets, or as to their immediate place 
of habitation, their home, their outermost shell, with 
its windows and doors, its outside appearance and 
inside plan, its rooms and furniture and arrangements, 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 155 

its altogether intimate facts, down to its very smell. 
This prompt and earnest evocation of the shell and 
its lining is but another way of testifying with due 
emphasis to economic conditions. The most personal 
shell of all, the significant dress of the individual, 
whether man or woman, is subject to as sharp and as 
deep a notation — it being no small part of his wealth 
of luck that the age of dress differentiated and spe- 
cialised from class to class and character to character, 
not least moreover among men, could still give him 
opportunities of choice, still help him to define and 
intensify, or peculiarly to place his apparitions. The 
old world in which costume had, to the last refinement 
of variety, a social meaning happily lingered on for 
him; and nothing is more interesting, nothing goes 
further in this sense of the way the social concrete 
could minister to him, than the fact that "Cesar 
Birotteau," to instance that masterpiece again, besides 
being a money-drama of the closest texture, the very 
epic of retail bankruptcy, is at the same time the all- 
vividest exhibition of the habited and figured, the 
representatively stamped and countenanced, buttoned 
and buckled state of the persons moving through it. 
No livelier example therefore can we name of the 
triumphant way in which any given, or as we should 
rather say taken, total of conditions works out under 
our author's hand for accentuation of type. The 
story of poor Birotteau is just in this supreme degree 
a hard total, even if every one's money-relation does 
loom larger, for his or her case, than anything else. 

The main thing doubtless to agree with M. Faguet 
about, however, is the wonder of the rate at which 
this genius for an infatuated grasp of the environment 



156 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

could multiply the creatures swarming, and swarming 
at their best to perfection, in that jungle of elements. 
A jungle certainly the environment, the rank many- 
coloured picture of France, would have been had it not 
really created in our observer the joy, thanks to his 
need of a clear and marked order, of its becoming so 
arrangeable. Nothing could interest us more than to 
note with our critic that such multiplications — taken 
after all at such a rush — have to be paid for by a sort 
of limitation of quality in each, the quality that, be- 
yond a certain point and after a certain allowance, 
ever looks askance at any approach to what it may 
be figured as taking for insolence of quantity. Some 
inquiry into the general mystery of such laws of pay- 
ment would beckon us on had we the space — whereby 
we might glance a little at the wondrous why and 
wherefore of the sacrifice foredoomed, the loss, greater 
or less, of those ideals now compromised by the tar- 
nished names of refinement and distinction, yet which 
we are none the less, at our decentest, still ashamed 
too entirely to turn our backs on, in the presence of 
energies that, shaking the air by their embrace of the 
common, tend to dispossess the rare of a certified place 
in it. Delightful to the critical mind to estimate the 
point at which, in the picture of life, a sense for the 
element of the rare ceases to consort with a sense, 
necessarily large and lusty, for the varieties of the real 
that super-abound. Reducible perhaps to some ex- 
quisite measure is this point of fatal divergence. It 
declared itself, the divergence, in the heart of Balzac's 
genius; for nothing about him is less to be gainsaid 
than that on the other or further side of a certain line 
of rareness drawn his authority, so splendid on the 
hither or familiar side, is sadly liable to lapse. It 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 157 

fails to take in whatever fine truth experience may 
have vouchsafed to us about the highest kinds of 
temper, the inward life of the mind, the cultivated 
consciousness. His truest and vividest people are 
those whom the conditions in which they are so pal- 
pably embedded have simplified not less than empha- 
sised; simplified mostly to singleness of motive and 
passion and interest, to quite measurably finite exis- 
tence; whereas his ostensibly higher spirits, types 
necessarily least observed and most independently 
thought out, in the interest of their humanity, as we 
would fain ourselves think them, are his falsest and 
weakest and show most where his imagination and 
his efficient sympathy break down. 

To say so much as this is doubtless to provoke the 
question of where and how then, under so many other 
restrictions, he is so great — which question is answered 
simply by our claim for his unsurpassed mastery of 
the "middling" sort, so much the most numerous in 
the world, the middling sort pressed upon by the vast 
variety of their dangers. These it is in their multi- 
tude whom he makes individually living, each with a 
clustered bunch of concomitants, as no one, to our 
mind, has equalled him in doing — above all with the 
amount of repetition of the feat considered. Finer 
images than the middling, but so much fewer, other 
creative talents have thrown ofT; swarms of the com- 
mon, on the other hand, have obeyed with an even 
greater air of multitude perhaps than in Balzac's 
pages the big brandished enumerative wand — only 
with a signal forfeiture in this case of that gift of the 
sharply separate, the really rounded, personality which 
he untiringly conferred, fimile Zola, by so far the 



i 5 8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

strongest example of his influence, mustered groups 
and crowds beyond even the master's own compass; 
but as throughout Zola we live and move for the most 
part but in crowds (he thinking his best but in terms 
of crowdedness), so in Balzac, where he rises highest, 
we deal, whether or no more for our sense of ugliness 
than of beauty, but with memorable person after per- 
son. He thought, on his side — when he thought at 
least to good purpose — in terms the most expressively 
personal, in such as could even eventuate in monsters 
and forms of evil the most finished we know; so that 
if he too has left us a multitude of which we may say 
that it stands alone for solidity, it nevertheless exists 
by addition and extension, not by a chemical shaking- 
together, a cheapening or diminishing fusion. 

It is not that the series of the Rougon-Macquart 
has not several distinct men and women to show — 
though they occur, as a fact, almost in "L'Assommoir" 
alone; it is not either that Zola did not on occasion 
try for the cultivated consciousness, a thing of course, 
so far as ever achieved anywhere, necessarily separate 
and distinguished; it is that he tried, on such ground, 
with a futility only a shade less marked than Balzac's, 
and perhaps would have tried with equal disaster had 
he happened to try oftener. If we find in his pages no 
such spreading waste as Balzac's general picture of 
the classes "enjoying every advantage," that is of the 
socially highest — to the elder writer's success in de- 
picting particularly the female members of which 
Sainte-Beuve, and Brunetiere in his footsteps, have 
rendered such strange and stupefying homage — the 
reason may very well be that such groups could not 
in the nature of the case figure to him after the fashion 



HONORfi DE BALZAC 159 

in which he liked groups to figure, as merely herded 
and compressed. To Balzac they were groups in 
which individualisation might be raised to its very 
finest; and it is by this possibility in them that we 
watch him and his fertile vulgarity, his peccant taste, 
so fallible for delicacies, so unerring for simplicities, 
above all doubtless the homeliest, strongest and grim- 
mest, wofully led astray. But it is fairly almost a 
pleasure to our admiration, before him, to see what 
we have permitted ourselves to call the "chunks" of 
excision carted ofT to the disengagement of the values 
that still live. The wondrous thing is that they live 
best where his grand vulgarity — since we are not 
afraid of the word — serves him rather than betrays; 
which it has to do, we make out, over the greater part 
of the field of any observer for whom man is on the 
whole cruelly, crushingly, deformedly conditioned. We 
grant that as to Balzac's view, and yet feel the view to 
have been at the same time incomparably active and 
productively genial; which are by themselves some- 
how qualities and reactions that redress the tragedy 
and the doom. The vulgarity was at any rate a force 
that simply got nearer than any other could have done 
to the whole detail, the whole intimate and evidenced 
story, of submission and perversion, and as such it 
could but prove itself immensely human. It is on all 
this considered ground that he has for so many years 
stood firm and that we feel him by reason of it and in 
spite of them, in spite of all that has come and gone, 
not to have yielded, have " given," an inch. 



GEORGE SAND 
1897 

I have been reading in the Revue de Paris for Novem- 
ber 1st, 1896, some fifty pages, of an extraordinary 
interest, which have had in respect to an old admira- 
tion a remarkable effect. Undoubtedly for other ad- 
mirers too who have come to fifty year — admirers, I 
mean, once eager, of the distinguished woman involved 
— the perusal of the letters addressed by George Sand 
to Alfred de Musset in the course of a famous friend- 
ship will have stirred in an odd fashion the ashes of 
an early ardour. I speak of ashes because early 
ardours for the most part burn themselves out, while 
the place they hold in our lives varies, I think, mainly 
according to the degree of tenderness with which we 
gather up and preserve their dust; and I speak of 
oddity because in the present case it is difficult to say 
whether the agitation of the embers results at last in a 
returning glow or in a yet more sensible chill. That 
indeed is perhaps a small question compared with the 
simple pleasure of the reviving emotion. One reads 
and wonders and enjoys again, just for the sake of the 
renewal. The small fry of the hour submit to further 
shrinkage, and we revert with a sigh of relief to the 
free genius and large life of one of the greatest of all 
masters of expression. Do people still handle the 
works of this master — people other than young ladies 
studying French with "La Mare au Diable" and a 

160 



GEORGE SAND 161 

dictionary? Are there persons who still read "Val- 
entine" ? Are there others capable of losing them- 
selves in "Mauprat" ? Has "Andre," the exquisite, 
dropped out of knowledge, and is any one left who 
remembers "Teverino" ? I ask these questions for the 
mere sweet sound of them, without the least expecta- 
tion of an answer. I remember asking them twenty 
years ago, after Madame Sand's death, and not then 
being hopeful of the answer of the future. But the 
only response that matters to us perhaps is our own, 
even if it be after all somewhat ambiguous. "Andre" 
and "Valentine" then are rather on our shelves than 
in our hands, but in the light of what is given us in 
the "Revue de Paris" who shall say that we do not, 
and with avidity, "read" George Sand? She died in 
1876, but she lives again intensely in these singular 
pages, both as to what in her spirit was most attaching 
and what most disconcerting. We are vague as to 
what they may represent for the generation that has 
come to the front since her death; nothing, I dare say, 
very imposing or even very pleasing. But they give 
out a great deal to a reader for whom thirty years 
ago — the best time to have taken her as a whole — she 
was a high clear figure, a great familiar magician. 
This impression is a strange mixture, but perhaps not 
quite incommunicable; and we are steeped as we 
receive it in one of the most curious episodes in the 
annals of the literary race. 

I 

It is the great interest of such an episode that, apart 
from its proportionate place in the unfolding of a 
personal life it has a wonderful deal to say on the rela- 
tion between experience and art at large. It con- 



162 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

stitutes an eminent special case, in which the workings 
of that relation are more or less uncovered; a case too 
of which one of the most striking notes is that we are 
in possession of it almost exclusively by the act of one 
of the persons concerned. Madame Sand at least, 
as we see to-day, was eager to leave nothing undone 
that could make us further acquainted than we were 
before with one of the liveliest chapters of her per- 
sonal history. We cannot, doubtless, be sure that 
her conscious purpose in the production of "Elle et 
Lui" was to show us the process by which private 
ecstasies and pains find themselves transmuted in the 
artist's workshop into promising literary material — 
any more than we can be certain of her motive for 
making toward the end of her life earnest and com- 
plete arrangements for the ultimate publication of the 
letters in which the passion is recorded and in which 
we can remount to the origin of the volume. If "Elle 
et Lui" had been the inevitable picture, postponed 
and retouched, of the great adventure of her youth, so 
the letters show us the crude primary stuff from which 
the moral detachment of the book was distilled. Were 
they to be given to the world for the encouragement 
of the artist-nature — as a contribution to the view 
that no suffering is great enough, no emotion tragic 
enough to exclude the hope that such pangs may sooner 
or later be esthetically assimilated ? Was the whole 
proceeding, in intention, a frank plea for the intellectual 
and in some degree even the commercial profit, to a 
robust organism, of a store of erotic reminiscence ? 
Whatever the reasons behind the matter, that is to a 
certain extent the moral of the strange story. 

It may be objected that this moral is qualified to 
come home to us only when the relation between art 



GEORGE SAND 163 

and experience really proves a happier one than it 
may be held to have proved in the combination before 
us. The element in danger of being most absent from 
the process is the element of dignity, and its presence, 
so far as that may ever at all be hoped for in an appeal 
from a personal quarrel, is assured only in proportion 
as the esthetic event, standing on its own feet, repre- 
sents a noble gift. It was vain, the objector may say, 
for our author to pretend to justify by so slight a per- 
formance as "Elle et Lui" that sacrifice of all delicacy 
which has culminated in this supreme surrender. 
"If you sacrifice all delicacy," I hear such a critic con- 
tend, "show at least that you were right by giving us 
a masterpiece. The novel in question is no more a 
masterpiece," I even hear him proceed, "than any 
other of the loose liquid lucid works of its author. By 
your supposition of a great intention you give much 
too fine an account on the one hand of a personal habit 
of incontinence and on the other of a literary habit of 
egotism. Madame Sand, in writing her tale and in 
publishing her love-letters, obeyed no prompting more 
exalted than that of exhibiting her personal (in which I 
include her verbal) facility, and of doing so at the cost 
of whatever other persons might be concerned; and 
you are therefore — and you might as well immediately 
confess it — thrown back for the element of interest on 
the attraction of her general eloquence, the plausibility 
of her general manner and the great number of her 
particular confidences. You are thrown back on your 
mere curiosity or sympathy — thrown back from any 
question of service rendered to 'art/' One might be 
thrown back doubtless still further even than such re- 
marks would represent if one were not quite prepared 
with the confession they propose. It is only because 



i6 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

such a figure is interesting — in every manifestation — 
that its course is marked for us by vivid footprints 
and possible lessons. And to enable us to find these 
it scarcely need have aimed after all so extravagantly 
high. George Sand lived her remarkable life and drove 
her perpetual pen, but the illustration that I began by 
speaking of is for ourselves to gather — if we can. 

I remember hearing many years ago in Paris an 
anecdote for the truth of which I am far from vouching, 
though it professed to come direct — an anecdote that 
has recurred to me more than once in turning over the 
revelations of the Revue de Paris, and without the 
need of the special reminder (in the shape of an allusion 
to her intimacy with the hero of the story) contained 
in those letters to Sainte-Beuve which are published 
in the number of November 15th. Prosper Merimee 
was said to have related — in a reprehensible spirit — 
that during a term of association with the author of 
"Leiia" he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter 
dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on 
her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick 
beside her and a red madras round her head, making 
bravely, with her own hands, the fire that was to 
enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and 
paper. The story represents him as having felt that 
the spectacle chilled his ardour and tried his taste; 
her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an 
inconsequence and her industry a reproof — the result 
of all of which was a lively irritation and an early 
rupture. To the firm admirer of Madame Sand's 
prose the little sketch has a very different value, for 
it presents her in an attitude which is the very key 
to the enigma, the answer to most of the questions 



GEORGE SAND 165 

with which her character confronts us. She rose early 
because she was pressed to write, and she was pressed 
to write because she had the greatest instinct of ex- 
pression ever conferred on a woman; a faculty that 
put a premium on all passion, on all pain, on all ex- 
perience and all exposure, on the greatest variety of 
ties and the smallest reserve about them. The really 
interesting thing in these posthumous laideurs is the 
way the gift, the voice, carries its possessor through 
them and lifts her on the whole above them. It gave 
her, it may be confessed at the outset and in spite of 
all magnanimities in the use of it, an unfair advantage 
in every connection. So at least we must continue to 
feel till — for our appreciation of this particular one 
— we have Alfred de Musset's share of the correspon- 
dence. For we shall have it at last, in whatever faded 
fury or beauty it may still possess — to that we may 
make up our minds. Let the galled jade wince, it is 
only a question of time. The greatest of literary quar- 
rels will in short, on the general ground, once more 
come up — the quarrel beside which all others are mild 
and arrangeable, the eternal dispute between the 
public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy. 

This discussion is precisely all the sharper because 
it takes place for each of us within as well as without. 
When we wish to know at all we wish to know every- 
thing; yet there happen to be certain things of which 
no better description can be given than that they are 
simply none of our business. "What is then forsooth 
of our business ?" the genuine analyst may always ask; 
and he may easily challenge us to produce any rule of 
general application by which we shall know when to 
push in and when to back out. "In the first place," 



166 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

he may continue, "half the 'interesting' people in the 
world have at one time or another set themselves to 
drag us in with all their might; and what in the world 
in such a relation is the observer that he should ab- 
surdly pretend to be in more of a flutter than the object 
observed ? The mannikin, in all schools, is at an early 
stage of study of the human form inexorably superseded 
by the man. Say that we are to give up the attempt 
to understand: it might certainly be better so, and 
there would be a delightful side to the new arrange- 
ment. But in the name of common-sense don't say 
that the continuity of life is not to have some equiva- 
lent in the continuity of pursuit, the renewal of phe- 
nomena in the renewal of notation. There is not a 
door you can lock here against the critic or the painter, 
not a cry you can raise or a long face you can pull at 
him, that are not quite arbitrary things. The only 
thing that makes the observer competent is that he is 
neither afraid nor ashamed; the only thing that makes 
him decent — just think ! — is that he is not superficial." 
All this is very well, but somehow we all equally feel 
that there is clean linen and soiled and that life would 
be intolerable without some acknowledgment even by 
the pushing of such a thing as forbidden ground. M. 
Emile Zola, at the moment I write, gives to the world 
his reasons for rejoicing in the publication of the 
physiological enquete of Dr. Toulouse — a marvellous 
catalogue or handbook of M. Zola's outward and in- 
ward parts, which leaves him not an inch of privacy, 
so to speak, to stand on, leaves him nothing about 
himself that is for himself, for his friends, his relatives, 
his intimates, his lovers, for discovery, for emulation, 
for fond conjecture or flattering deluded envy. It is 
enough for M. Zola that everything is for the public 



GEORGE SAND 167 

and no sacrifice worth thinking of when it is a question 
of presenting to the open mouth of that apparently 
gorged but still gaping monster the smallest spoonful 
of truth. The truth, to his view, is never either ridic- 
ulous or unclean, and the way to a better life lies 
through telling it, so far as possible, about everything 
and about every one. 

There would probably be no difficulty in agreeing 
to this if it didn't seem on the part of the speaker the 
result of a rare confusion between give and take, be- 
tween "truth" and information. The true thing that 
most matters to us is the true thing we have most use 
for, and there are surely many occasions on which the 
truest thing of all is the necessity of the mind, its sim- 
ple necessity of feeling. Whether it feels in order to 
learn or learns in order to feel, the event is the same: 
the side on which it shall most feel will be the side to 
which it will most incline. If it feels more about a 
Zola functionally undeciphered it will be governed 
more by that particular truth than by the truth about 
his digestive idiosyncrasies, or even about his "olfactive 
perceptions" and his "arithmomania or impulse to 
count." An affirmation of our "mere taste" may very 
supposedly be our individual contribution to the gen- 
eral clearing up. Nothing often is less superficial than 
to ignore and overlook, or more constructive (for liv- 
ing and feeling at all) than to want impatiently to 
choose. If we are aware that in the same way as 
about a Zola undeciphered we should have felt more 
about a George Sand unexposed, the true thing we 
have gained becomes a poor substitute for the one we 
have lost; and I scarce see what difference it makes 
that the view of the elder novelist appears in this mat- 



168 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

ter quite to march with that of the younger. I hasten 
to add that as to being of course asked why in the 
world with such a leaning we have given time either 
to M. Zola's physician or to Musset's correspondent, 
this is only another illustration of the bewildering 
state of the subject. 

When we meet on the broad highway the rueful 
denuded figure we need some presence of mind to 
decide whether to cut it dead or to lead it gently home, 
and meanwhile the fatal complication easily occurs. 
We have seen, in a flash of our own wit, and mystery 
has fled with a shriek. These encounters are indeed 
accidents which may at any time take place, and the 
general guarantee in a noisy world lies, I judge, not so 
much in any hope of really averting them as in a reg- 
ular organisation of the struggle. The reporter and 
the reported have duly and equally to understand that 
they carry their life in their hands. There are secrets 
for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated 
on the part of the hunted creature with even half the 
method with which the love of sport — or call it the 
historic sense — is cultivated on the part of the inves- 
tigator. They have been left too much to the natural, 
the instinctive man; but they will be twice as effective 
after it begins to be observed that they may take their 
place among the triumphs of civilisation. Then at 
last the game will be fair and the two forces face to 
face; it will be "pull devil, pull tailor," and the hard- 
est pull will doubtless provide the happiest result. 
Then the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with 
resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything 
we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, 
with every track covered, every paper burnt and 



GEORGE SAND 169 

every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the 
invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege 
of all the years. 



II 

It was not in the tower of art that George Sand ever 
shut herself up; but I come back to a point already 
made in saying that it is in the citadel of style that, 
notwithstanding rash sorties, she continues to hold out. 
The outline of the complicated story that was to cause 
so much ink to flow gives, even with the omission of a 
hundred features, a direct measure of the strain to 
which her astonishing faculty was exposed. In the 
summer of 1833, as a woman of nearly thirty, she en- 
countered Alfred de Musset, who was six years her 
junior. In spite of their youth they were already 
somewhat bowed by the weight of a troubled past. 
Musset, at twenty-three, had that of his confirmed 
libertinism — so Madame Arvede Barine, who has had 
access to materials, tells us in the admirable short 
biography of the poet contributed to the rather mark- 
edly unequal but very interesting series of Hachette's 
Grands Ecrivains Francais. Madame Sand had a 
husband, a son and a daughter, and the impress of 
that succession of lovers — Jules Sandeau had been 
one, Prosper Merimee another — to which she so freely 
alludes in the letters to Sainte-Beuve, a friend more 
disinterested than these and qualified to give much 
counsel in exchange for much confidence. It cannot 
be said that the situation of either of our young per- 
sons was of good omen for a happy relation, but they 
appear to have burnt their ships with much prompti- 
tude and a great blaze, and in the December of that 



i7o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

year they started together for Italy. The following 
month saw them settled, on a frail basis, in Venice, 
where the elder companion remained till late in the sum- 
mer of 1834 and where she wrote, in part, "Jacques" 
and the "Lettres d'un Voyageur," as well as "An- 
dre" and "Leone-Leoni," and gathered the impres- 
sions to be embodied later in half-a-dozen stories 
with Italian titles — notably in the delightful "Con- 
suelo." The journey, the Italian climate, the Venetian 
winter at first agreed with neither of the friends; 
they were both taken ill — the young man very gravely 
— and after a stay of three months Musset returned, 
alone and much ravaged, to Paris. 

In the meantime a great deal had happened, for 
their union had been stormy and their security small. 
Madame Sand had nursed her companion in illness 
(a matter-of-course office, it must be owned) and her 
companion had railed at his nurse in health. A 
young physician, called in, had become a close friend 
of both parties, but more particularly a close friend 
of the lady, and it was to his tender care that on quit- 
ting the scene Musset solemnly committed her. She 
took up life with Pietro Pagello — the transition is 
startling — for the rest of her stay, and on her journey 
back to France he was no inconsiderable part of her 
luggage. He was simple, robust and kind — not a man 
of genius. He remained, however, but a short time 
in Paris; in the autumn of 1834 he returned to Italy, 
to live on till our own day but never again, so far as we 
know, to meet his illustrious mistress. Her inter- 
course with her poet was, in all its intensity, one may 
almost say its ferocity, promptly renewed, and was 
sustained in that key for several months more. The 



GEORGE SAND 171 

effect of this strange and tormented passion on the 
mere student of its records is simply to make him ask 
himself what on earth is the matter with the subjects 
of it. Nothing is more easy than to say, as I have 
intimated, that it has no need of records and no need 
of students; but this leaves out of account the thick 
medium of genius in which it was foredoomed to dis- 
port itself. It was self-registering, as the phrase is, 
for the genius on both sides happened to be the genius 
of eloquence. It is all rapture and all rage and all 
literature. The "Lettres d'un Voyageur" spring from 
the thick of the fight; "La Confession d'un Enfant du 
Siecle" and "Les Nuits" are immediate echoes of the 
concert. The lovers are naked in the market-place 
and perform for the benefit of society. The matter 
with them, to the perception of the stupefied spectator, 
is that they entertained for each other every feeling 
in life but the feeling of respect. What the absence 
of that article may do for the passion of hate is appar- 
ently nothing to what it may do for the passion of 
love. 

By our unhappy pair at any rate the luxury in 
question — the little luxury of plainer folk — was not to 
be purchased, and in the comedy of their despair and 
the tragedy of their recovery nothing is more striking 
than their convulsive effort either to reach up to it or 
to do without it. They would have given for it all 
else they possessed, but they only meet in their strug- 
gle the inexorable never. They strain and pant and 
gasp, they beat the air in vain for the cup of cold 
water of their hell. They missed it in a way for which 
none of their superiorities could make up. Their 
great affliction was that each found in the life of the 



172 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

other an armoury of weapons to wound. Young as 
they were, young as Musset was in particular, they 
appeared to have afforded each other in that direction 
the most extraordinary facilities; and nothing in the 
matter of the mutual consideration that failed them is 
more sad and strange than that even in later years, 
when their rage, very quickly, had cooled, they never 
arrived at simple silence. For Madame Sand, in her 
so much longer life, there was no hush, no letting 
alone; though it would be difficult indeed to exag- 
gerate the depth of relative indifference from which, 
a few years after Musset's death, such a production 
as "Elle et Lui" could spring. Of course there had 
been floods of tenderness, of forgiveness; but those, 
for all their beauty of expression, are quite another 
matter. It is just the fact of our sense of the ugliness 
of so much of the episode that makes a wonder and a 
force of the fine style, all round, in which it is offered 
us. That force is in its turn a sort of clue to guide, 
or perhaps rather a sign to stay, our feet in paths after 
all not the most edifying. It gives a degree of impor- 
tance to the somewhat squalid and the somewhat 
ridiculous story, and, for the old George-Sandist at 
least, lends a positive spell to the smeared and yel- 
lowed paper, the blotted and faded ink. In this twi- 
light of association we seem to find a reply to our own 
challenge and to be able to tell ourselves why we med- 
dle with such old dead squabbles and waste our time 
with such grimacing ghosts. If we were superior to 
the weakness, moreover, how should we make our 
point (which we must really make at any cost) as to 
the so valuable vivid proof that a great talent is the 
best guarantee — that it may really carry off almost 
anything ? 



GEORGE SAND 173 

The rather sorry ghost that beckons us on furthest 
is the rare personality of Madame Sand. Under its 
influence — or that of old memories from which it is 
indistinguishable — we pick our steps among the laideurs 
aforesaid: the misery, the levity, the brevity of it all, 
the greatest ugliness in particular that this life shows us, 
the way the devotions and passions that we see heaven 
and earth called to witness are over before we can turn 
round. It may be said that, for what it was, the inter- 
course of these unfortunates surely lasted long enough; 
but the answer to that is that if it had only lasted 
longer it wouldn't have been what it was. It was not 
only preceded and followed by intimacies, on one side 
and the other, as unadorned by the stouter sincerity, 
but was mixed up with them in a manner that would 
seem to us dreadful if it didn't still more seem to us 
droll, or rather perhaps if it didn't refuse altogether 
to come home to us with the crudity of contemporary 
things. It is antediluvian history, a queer vanished 
world — another Venice from the actually, the de- 
plorably familiarised, a Paris of greater bonhomie, an 
inconceivable impossible Nohant. This relegates it 
to an order agreeable somehow to the imagination of 
the fond quinquegenarian, the reader with a fund of 
reminiscence. The vanished world, the Venice unre- 
storecr, the Paris unextended, is a bribe to his judg- 
ment; he has even a glance of complacency for the 
lady's liberal foyer. Liszt, one lovely year at Nohant, 
"jouait du piano au rez-de-chaussee, et les rossignols, 
ivres de musique et de soleil, s'egosillaient avec rage 
sur les lilas environnants." The beautiful manner 
confounds itself with the conditions in which it was 
exercised, the large liberty and variety overflow into 
admirable prose, and the whole thing makes a charm- 



i 7 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

ing faded medium in which Chopin gives a hand to 
Consuelo and the small Fadette has her elbows on the 
table of Flaubert. 

There is a terrible letter of the autumn of 1834 in 
which our heroine has recourse to Alfred Tattet on a 
dispute with the bewildered Pagello — a disagreeable 
matter that involved a question of money. " A Venise 
il comprenait," she somewhere says, "a Paris il ne 
comprend plus." It was a proof of remarkable in- 
telligence that he did understand in Venice, where 
he had become a lover in the presence and with the 
exalted approval of an immediate predecessor — an 
alternate representative of the part, whose turn had 
now, on the removal to Paris, come round again and in 
whose resumption of office it was looked to him to 
concur. This attachment — to Pagello — had lasted but 
a few months; yet already it was the prey of complica- 
tion and change, and its sun appears to have set in no 
very graceful fashion. We are not here in truth 
among very graceful things, in spite of superhuman 
attitudes and great romantic flights. As to these 
forced notes Madame Arvede Barine judiciously says 
that the picture of them contained in the letters to 
which she had had access, and some of which are be- 
fore us, "presents an example extraordinary and un- 
matched of what the romantic spirit could do with 
beings who had become its prey." She adds that she 
regards the records in question, "in which we follow 
step by step the ravages of the monster," as "one of 
the most precious psychological documents of the first 
half of the century." That puts the story on its true 
footing, though we may regret that it should not 
divide these documentary honours more equally with 



GEORGE SAND 175 

some other story in which the monster has not quite 
so much the best of it. But it is the misfortune of the 
comparatively short and simple annals of conduct and 
character that they should ever seem to us somehow 
to cut less deep. Scarce — to quote again his best 
biographer — had Musset, at Venice, begun to re- 
cover from his illness than the two lovers were seized 
afresh by le vertige du sublime et de V impossible. "lis 
imaginerent les deviations de sentiment les plus bi- 
zarres, et leur interieur fut le theatre de scenes qui 
egalaient en etrangete les fantaisies les plus audacieuses 
de la litterature contemporaine; ,, that is of the litera- 
ture of their own day. The register of virtue con- 
tains no such lively items — save indeed in so far as 
these contortions and convulsions were a conscious 
tribute to virtue. 

Ten weeks after Musset has left her in Venice his 
relinquished but not dissevered mistress writes to him 
in Paris: "God keep you, my friend, in your present 
disposition of heart and mind. Love is a temple built 
by the lover to an object more or less worthy of his 
worship, and what is grand in the thing is not so much 
the god as the altar. Why should you be afraid of 
the risk?" — of a new mistress she means. There 
would seem to be reasons enough why he should have 
been afraid, but nothing is more characteristic than her 
eagerness to push him into the arms of another woman 
— more characteristic either of her whole philosophy 
in these matters or of their tremendous, though some- 
what conflicting, effort to be good. She is to be good 
by showing herself so superior to jealousy as to stir up 
in him a new appetite for a new object, and he is to 
be so by satisfying it to the full. It appears not to 



176 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

occur to either one that in such an arrangement his 
own honesty is rather sacrificed. Or is it indeed be- 
cause he has scruples — or even a sense of humour — 
that she insists with such ingenuity and such eloquence ? 
"Let the idol stand long or let it soon break, you will 
in either case have built a beautiful shrine. Your soul 
will have lived in it, have filled it with divine incense, 
and a soul like yours must produce great works. The 
god will change perhaps, the temple will last as long 
as yourself. ,, "Perhaps," under the circumstances, 
was charming. The letter goes on with the ample 
flow that was always at the authors command — an 
ease of suggestion and generosity, of beautiful melan- 
choly acceptance, in which we foresee, on her own 
horizon, the dawn of new suns. Her simplifications 
are delightful — they remained so to the end; her 
touch is a wondrous sleight-of-hand. The whole of 
this letter in short is a splendid utterance and a mas- 
terpiece of the shade of sympathy, not perhaps the 
clearest, which consists of wishing another to feel as 
you feel yourself. To feel as George Sand felt, how- 
ever, one had to be, like George Sand, of the true male 
inwardness; which poor Musset was far from being. 
This, we surmise, was the case with most of her lovers, 
and the truth that makes the idea of her liaison with 
Merimee, who was of a consistent virility, sound almost 
like a union against nature. She repeats to her corre- 
spondent, on grounds admirably stated, the injunc- 
tion that he is to give himself up, to let himself go, to 
take his chance. That he took it we all know — he fol- 
lowed her advice only too well. It is indeed not long 
before his manner of doing so draws from her a cry of 
distress. "Ta conduite est deplorable, impossible. 
Mon Dieu, a quelle vie vais-je te laisser ? l'ivresse, le 



GEORGE SAND 177 

vin, les filles, et encore et toujours!" But appre- 
hensions were now too late; they would have been too 
late at the very earliest stage of this celebrated con- 
nection. 



Ill 

The great difficulty was that, though they were sub- 
lime, the couple were really not serious. But on the 
other hand if on a lady's part in such a relation the 
want of sincerity or of constancy is a grave reproach 
the matter is a good deal modified when the lady, as I 
have mentioned, happens to be — I may not go so far 
as to say a gentleman. That George Sand just fell 
short of this character was the greatest difficulty of 
all; because if a woman, in a love affair, may be — for 
all she is to gain or to lose — what she likes, there is 
only one thing that, to carry it off with any degree of 
credit, a man may be. Madame Sand forgot this on 
the day she published "Elle et Lui' J ; she forgot it 
again more gravely when she bequeathed to the great 
snickering public these present shreds and relics of 
unutterably personal things. The aberration refers 
itself to the strange lapses of still other occasions — 
notably to the extraordinary absence of scruples with 
which she in the delightful "Histoire de ma Vie" 
gives away, as we say, the character of her remarkable 
mother. The picture is admirable for vividness, for 
breadth of touch; it would be perfect from any hand 
not a daughter's, and we ask ourselves wonderingly 
how through all the years, to make her capable of it, a 
long perversion must have worked and the filial fibre 
— or rather the general flower of sensibility — have been 
battered. Not this particular anomaly, however, but 



178 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

many another, yields to the reflection that as just after 
her death a very perceptive person who had known 
her well put it to the author of these remarks, she was 
a woman quite by accident. Her immense plausibility 
was almost the only sign of her sex. She needed 
always to prove that she had been in the right; as how 
indeed could a person fail to who, thanks to the spe- 
cial equipment I have named, might prove it so bril- 
liantly ? It is not too much to say of her gift of ex- 
pression — and I have already in effect said so — that 
from beginning to end it floated her over the real as a 
high tide floats a ship over the bar. She was never 
left awkwardly straddling on the sandbank of fact. 

For the rest, in any case, with her free experience 
and her free use of it, her literary style, her love of 
ideas and questions, of science and philosophy, her 
comradeship, her boundless tolerance, her intellectual 
patience, her personal good-humour and perpetual 
tobacco (she smoked long before women at large felt 
the cruel obligation), with all these things and many 
I don't mention she had more of the inward and out- 
ward of the other sex than of her own. She had 
above all the mark that, to speak at this time of day 
with a freedom for which her action in the matter of 
publicity gives us warrant, the history of her personal 
passions reads singularly like a chronicle of the ravages 
of some male celebrity. Her relations with men closely 
resembled those relations with women that, from the 
age of Pericles or that of Petrarch, have been com- 
placently commemorated as stages in the unfolding 
of the great statesman and the great poet. It is very 
much the same large list, the same story of free ap- 
propriation and consumption. She appeared in short 



GEORGE SAND 179 

to have lived through a succession of such ties ex- 
actly in the manner of a Goethe, a Byron or a Na- 
poleon; and if millions of women, of course, of every 
condition, had had more lovers, it was probable that 
no woman independently so occupied and so diligent 
had had, as might be said, more unions. Her fashion 
was quite her own of extracting from this sort of ex- 
perience all that it had to give her and being withal 
only the more just and bright and true, the more sane 
and superior, improved and improving. She strikes 
us as in the benignity of such an intercourse even more 
than maternal: not so much the mere fond mother 
as the supersensuous grandmother of the wonderful 
affair. Is not that practically the character in which 
Therese Jacques studies to present herself to Laurent 
de Fauvel ? the light in which "Lucrezia Floriani" (a 
memento of a friendship for Chopin, for Liszt) shows 
the heroine as affected toward Prince Karol and his 
friend ? George Sand is too inveterately moral, too 
preoccupied with that need to do good which is in art 
often the enemy of doing well; but in all her work 
the story-part, as children call it, has the freshness and 
good faith of a monastic legend. It is just possible 
indeed that the moral idea was the real mainspring of 
her course — I mean a sense of the duty of avenging on 
the unscrupulous race of men their immemorial selfish 
success with the plastic race of women. Did she wish 
above all to turn the tables — to show how the sex 
that had always ground the other in the volitional mill 
was on occasion capable of being ground ? 

However this may be, nothing is more striking than 
the inward impunity with which she gave herself to 
conditions that are usually held to denote or to involve 



180 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

a state of demoralisation. This impunity (to speak 
only of consequences or features that concern us) was 
not, I admit, complete, but it was sufficiently so to 
warrant us in saying that no one was ever less demor- 
alised. She presents a case prodigiously discouraging 
to the usual view — the view that there is no surrender 
to "unconsecrated" passion that we escape paying 
for in one way or another. It is frankly difficult to 
see where this eminent woman conspicuously paid. 
She positively got off from paying — and in a cloud 
of fluency and dignity, benevolence, competence, in- 
telligence. She sacrificed, it is true, a handful of 
minor coin — suffered by failing wholly to grasp in her 
picture of life certain shades and certain delicacies. 
What she paid was this irrecoverable loss of her touch 
for them. That is undoubtedly one of the reasons 
why to-day the picture in question has perceptibly 
faded, why there are persons who would perhaps even 
go so far as to say that it has really a comic side. She 
doesn't know, according to such persons, her right hand 
from her left, the crooked from the straight and the 
clean from the unclean: it was a sense she lacked or a 
tact she had rubbed off, and her great work is by the 
fatal twist quite as lopsided a monument as the leaning 
tower of Pisa. Some readers may charge her with a 
graver confusion still — the incapacity to distinguish 
between fiction and fact, the truth straight from the 
well and the truth curling in steam from the kettle and 
preparing the comfortable tea. There is no word 
oftener on her pen, they will remind us, than the verb 
to "arrange." She arranged constantly, she arranged 
beautifully; but from this point of view, that of a 
general suspicion of arrangements, she always proved 
too much. Turned over in the light of it the story of 



GEORGE SAND 181 

"Elle et Lui" for instance is an attempt to prove that 
the mistress of Laurent de Fauvel was little less than 
a prodigy of virtue. What is there not, the intem- 
perate admirer may be challenged to tell us, an attempt 
to prove in "L'Histoire de ma Vie" ? — a work from 
which we gather every delightful impression but the 
impression of an impeccable veracity. 

These reservations may, however, all be sufficiently 
just without affecting our author's peculiar air of hav- 
ing eaten her cake and had it, been equally initiated 
in directions the most opposed. Of how much cake 
she partook the letters to Musset and Sainte-Beuve 
well show us, and yet they fall in at the same time, on 
other sides, with all that was noble in her mind, all 
that is beautiful in the books just mentioned and in 
the six volumes of the general "Correspondance: 1812- 
1876," out of which Madame Sand comes so immensely 
to her advantage. She had, as liberty, all the adven- 
tures of which the dots are so put on the i's by the 
documents lately published, and then she had, as law, 
as honour and serenity, all her fine reflections on them 
and all her splendid busy literary use of them. Noth- 
ing perhaps gives more relief to her masculine stamp 
than the rare art and success with which she cultivated 
an equilibrium. She made from beginning to end a 
masterly study of composure, absolutely refusing to be 
upset, closing her door at last against the very ap- 
proach of irritation and surprise. She had arrived at 
her quiet elastic synthesis — a good-humour, an indul- 
gence that were an armour of proof. The great felicity 
of all this was that it was neither indifference nor re- 
nunciation, but on the contrary an intense partaking; 
imagination, affection, sympathy and life, the way she 



1 82 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

had found for herself of living most and living longest. 
However well it all agreed with her happiness and her 
manners, it agrees still better with her style, as to 
which we come back with her to the sense that this 
was really her point d'appui or sustaining force. Most 
people have to say, especially about themselves, only 
what they can; but she said — and we nowhere see it 
better than in the letters to Musset — everything in 
life that she wanted. We can well imagine the effect 
of that consciousness on the nerves of this particular 
correspondent, his own poor gift of occasional song 
(to be so early spent) reduced to nothing by so un- 
equalled a command of the last word. We feel it, I 
hasten to add, this last word, in all her letters: the 
occasion, no matter which, gathers it from her as the 
breeze gathers the scent from the garden. It is always 
the last word of sympathy and sense, and we meet it 
on every page of the voluminous "Correspondance." 
These pages are not so "clever" as those, in the same 
order, of some other famous hands — the writer always 
denied, justly enough, that she had either wit or 
presence of mind — and they are not a product of high 
spirits or of a marked avidity for gossip. But they 
have admirable ease, breadth and generosity; they 
are the clear quiet overflow of a very full cup. They 
speak above all for the author's great gift, her eye for 
the inward drama. Her hand is always on the fiddle- 
string, her ear is always at the heart. It was in the 
soul, in a word, that she saw the drama begin, and to 
the soul that, after whatever outward flourishes, she 
saw it confidently come back. She herself lived with 
all her perceptions and in all her chambers — not 
merely in the showroom of the shop. This brings us 
once more to the question of the instrument and the 



GEORGE SAND 183 

tone, and to our idea that the tone, when you are so 
lucky as to possess it, may be of itself a solution. 

By a solution I mean a secret for saving not only 
your reputation but your life — that of your soul; an 
antidote to dangers which the unendowed can hope to 
escape by no process less uncomfortable or less in- 
glorious than that of prudence and precautions. The 
unendowed must go round about, the others may go 
straight through the wood. Their weaknesses, those 
of the others, shall be as well redeemed as their books 
shall be well preserved; it may almost indeed be said 
that they are made wise in spite of themselves. If 
you have never in all your days had a weakness worth 
mentioning, you can be after all no more, at the very 
most, than large and cheerful and imperturbable. 
All these things Madame Sand managed to be on just 
the terms she had found, as we see, most convenient. 
So much, I repeat, does there appear to be in a tone. 
But if the perfect possession of one made her, as it 
well might, an optimist, the action of it is perhaps more 
consistently happy in her letters and her personal 
records than in her "creative" work. Her novels 
to-day have turned rather pale and faint, as if the 
image projected — not intense, not absolutely concrete 
— failed to reach completely the mind's eye. And the 
odd point is that the wonderful charm of expression is 
not really a remedy for this lack of intensity, but 
rather an aggravation of it through a sort of suffusion 
of the whole thing by the voice and speech of the 
author. These things set the subject, whatever it be, 
afloat in the upper air, where it takes a happy bath of 
brightness and vagueness or swims like a soap-bubble 
kept up by blowing. This is no drawback when she 



i8 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

is on the ground of her own life, to which she is tied by 
a certain number of tangible threads; but to embark 
on one of her confessed fictions is to have — after all 
that has come and gone, in our time, in the trick of 
persuasion — a little too much the feeling of going up 
in a balloon. We are borne by a fresh cool current 
and the car delightfully dangles; but as we peep over 
the sides we see things — as we usually know them — at 
a dreadful drop beneath. Or perhaps a better way to 
express the sensation is to say what I have just been 
struck with in the re-perusal of "Elle et Lui"; namely 
that this book, like others by the same hand, affects 
the reader — and the impression is of the oddest — not 
as a first but as a second echo or edition of the imme- 
diate real, or in other words of the subject. The tale 
may in this particular be taken as typical of the 
authors manner; beautifully told, but told, as if on 
a last remove from the facts, by some one repeating 
what he has read or what he has had from another 
and thereby inevitably becoming more general and 
superficial, missing or forgetting the "hard" parts and 
slurring them over and making them up. Of every- 
thing but feelings the presentation is dim. We recog- 
nise that we shall never know the original narrator 
and that the actual introducer is the only one we can 
deal with. But we sigh perhaps as we reflect that we 
may never confront her with her own informant. 

To that, however, we must resign ourselves; for I 
remember in time that the volume from which I take 
occasion to speak with this levity is the work that I 
began by pronouncing a precious illustration. With 
the aid of the disclosures of the Revue de Paris it was, 
as I hinted, to show us that no mistakes and no pains 



GEORGE SAND 185 

are too great to be, in the air of art, triumphantly con- 
vertible. Has it really performed this function ? I 
thumb again my copy of the limp little novel and won- 
der what, alas, I shall reply. The case is extreme, for 
it was the case of a suggestive experience particularly 
dire, and the literary flower that has bloomed upon it 
is not quite the full-blown rose. "Oeuvre de ran- 
cune" Arvede Barine pronounces it, and if we take 
it as that we admit that the artists distinctness from 
her material was not ideally complete. Shall I not 
better the question by saying that it strikes me less as 
a work of rancour than — in a peculiar degree — as a 
work of egotism ? It becomes in that light at any rate 
a sufficiently happy affirmation of the author's in- 
fallible form. This form was never a more successful 
vehicle for the conveyance of sweet reasonableness. 
It is all superlatively calm and clear; there never was 
a kinder, balmier last word. Whatever the measure 
of justice of the particular representation, moreover, 
the picture has only to be put beside the recent docu- 
ments, the "study," as I may call them, to illustrate 
the general phenomenon. Even if "Elle et Lui" is 
not the full-blown rose we have enough here to place 
in due relief an irrepressible tendency to bloom. In 
fact I seem already to discern that tendency in the 
very midst of the storm; the "tone" in the letters too 
has its own way and performs on its own account — 
which is but another manner of saying that the literary 
instinct, in the worst shipwreck, is never out of its 
depth. The worker observed at the fire by Merimee 
could be drowned but in an ocean of ink. Is that a 
sufficient account of what I have called the laying 
bare of the relation between experience and art ? With 
the two elements, the life and the genius, face to face 



186 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

— the smutches and quarrels at one end of the chain 
and the high luminosity at the other — does some 
essential link still appear to be missing? How do 
the graceless facts after all confound themselves with 
the beautiful spirit ? They do so, incontestably, be- 
fore our eyes, and the mystification remains. We try 
to trace the process, but before we break down we had 
better perhaps hasten to grant that — so far at least 
as George Sand is concerned — some of its steps are 
impenetrable secrets of the grand manner. 



GEORGE SAND 
1899 

Those among us comfortably conscious of our different 
usage — aware, some would say, of our better conscience 
— may well have remarked the general absence from 
French practice of biographic commemoration of ex- 
tinct worthies. The Life as we understand it, the 
prompt pious spacious record and mirror of the emi- 
nent career, rarely follows the death. The ghost of 
the great man, when he happens to have been a French- 
man, "sits" for such portraiture, we gather, with a 
confidence much less assured than among ourselves, 
and with fewer relatives and friends to surround the 
chair. The manner in which even for persons of 
highest mark among our neighbours biography either 
almost endlessly hangs back or altogether fails, sug- 
gests that the approach is even when authorised too 
often difficult. This general attitude toward the ques- 
tion, it would thus appear, implies for such retrospects 
the predominance of doors bolted and barred. Hes- 
itation is therefore fairly logical, for it rests on the 
assumption that men and women of great gifts will 
have lived with commensurate intensity, and that as 
regards some of the forms of this intensity the dis- 
cretion of the inquirer may well be the better part of 
his enthusiasm. The critic can therefore only note 
with regret so much absent opportunity for the play 
of perception and the art of composition. The race 
that produced Balzac — to say nothing of Sainte-Beuve 

187 



188 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

— would surely have produced a Boswell, a Lockhart 
and a Trevelyan if the fashion had not set so strongly 
against it. We have lately had a capital example of 
the encounter of an admirable English portraitist and 
an admirable English subject. It is not irrelevant 
to cite such a book as Mr. Mackail's "Life of William 
Morris" as our high-water mark — a reminder of how 
we may be blessed on both faces of the question. Each 
term of the combination appears supposable in France, 
but only as distinct from the other term. The artist, 
we gather, would there have lost his chance and the 
sitter his ease. 

It completes in an interesting way these observa- 
tions, which would bear much expansion, to perceive 
that when we at last have a Life of George Sand — a 
celebrity living with the imputed intensity, if ever a 
celebrity did — we are indebted for it to the hand of a 
stranger. No fact could more exactly point the moral 
of my few remarks. Madame Sand's genius and re- 
nown would have long ago made her a subject at home 
if alacrity in such a connection had been to be dreamed 
of. There is no more significant sign of the general 
ban under which alacrity rests. Everything about this 
extraordinary woman is interesting, and we can easily 
imagine the posthumous honours we ourselves would 
have hastened to assure to a part taken, in literature 
and life, with such brilliancy and sincerity. These 
demonstrations, where we should most look for them, 
have been none the less as naught — save indeed, to be 
exact, for the publication of a number of volumes of 
letters. It is just Madame Sand's letters, however — 
letters interesting and admirable, peculiarly qual- 
ified to dispose the reader in her favour — that in En- 



GEORGE SAND 189 

gland or in America would have quickened the need 
for the rest of the evidence. But now that, as befalls, 
we do at last have the rest of the evidence as we never 
have had it before, we are of course sufficiently en- 
lightened as to the reasons for a special application 
of the law of reserves and delays. It is not in fact easy 
to see how a full study of our heroine could have been 
produced earlier; and even at present there is a sensible 
comfort in its being produced at such a distance as 
practically assigns the act to a detached posterity. 
Contemporaneously it was wise to forbear; but to- 
day, and in Russia, by good luck, it is permitted to 
plunge. 

Mme. Wladimir Karenine's extraordinarily diffuse, 
but scarcely less valuable, biography, of which the 
first instalment, 1 in two large volumes, brings the story 
but to the year 1838, reaches us in a French version, 
apparently from the author's own hand, of chapters 
patiently contributed to Russian periodicals. Were it 
not superficially ungrateful to begin with reserves 
about a book so rich and full, there might be some com- 
plaint to make of this wonderful tribute on grounds 
of form and taste. Ponderous and prolix, the author 
moves in a mass, escorted by all the penalties of her 
indifference to selection and compression. She in- 
sists and repeats, she wanders wide; her subject spreads 
about her, in places, as rather a pathless waste. Above 
all she has produced a book which manages to be at 
once remarkably expert and singularly provincial. 
Our innocence is perhaps at fault, but we are moved 
to take the mixture for characteristically Russian. 
Would indeed any but that admirable "Slav" supe- 

1 "George Sand, sa Vie et ses CEuvres, 1804-1876." Paris, 1899. 



190 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

riority to prejudice of which we have lately heard so 
much have availed to handle the particular facts in 
this large free way ? Nothing is at all events more 
curious than the union, on the part of our biographer, 
of psychological intelligence and a lame esthetic. The 
writer's literary appreciations lag in other words half 
a century behind her human and social. She treats 
us to endless disquisitions on pages of her author to 
which we are no longer in any manageable relation 
at all — disquisitions pathetic, almost grotesque, in their 
misplaced good faith. But her attitude to her sub- 
ject is admirable, her thoroughness exemplary, the 
spirit of service in her of the sort that builds the mon- 
ument stone by stone. When we see it reared to the 
summit, as we are clearly to do, we shall feel the 
structure to be solid if not shapely. Nothing is more 
possible meanwhile than that a culture more homoge- 
neous — a French hand or a German — could not have 
engaged in the work with anything like the same sin- 
cerity. An English hand — and the fact, for our cul- 
ture, means much — would have been incapable of 
touching it. The present scale of it at all events is 
certainly an exotic misconception. But we can take 
of it what concerns us. 

The whole thing of course, we promptly reflect, 
concerns at the best only those of us who can remount 
a little the stream of time. The author of "L'Histoire 
de ma Vie" died in 1876, and the light of actuality 
rests to-day on very different heads. It may seem to 
belittle her to say that to care for her at all one must 
have cared for her from far back, for such is not in 
general the proviso we need to make on behalf of the 
greatest figures. It describes Madame Sand with 



GEORGE SAND 191 

breadth, but not with extravagance, to speak of her 
as a sister to Goethe, and we feel that for Goethe it 
can never be too late to care. But the case exempli- 
fies perhaps precisely the difference even in the most 
brilliant families between sisters and brothers. She 
was to have the family spirit, but she was to receive 
from the fairies who attended at her cradle the silver 
cup, not the gold. She was to write a hundred books 
but she was not to write "Faust." She was to have 
all the distinction but not all the perfection; and there 
could be no better instance of the degree in which a 
woman may achieve the one and still fail of the other. 
When it is a question of the rare originals who have 
either she confirms us, masculine as she is, in believing 
that it takes a still greater masculinity to have both. 
What she had, however, she had in profusion; she 
was one of the deepest voices of that great mid-century 
concert against the last fine strains of which we are 
more and more banging the doors. Her work, beau- 
tiful, plentiful and fluid, has floated itself out to sea 
even as the melting snows of the high places are floated. 
To feel how she has passed away as a "creator" is to 
feel anew the immense waste involved in the general 
ferment of an age, and how much genius and beauty, 
let alone the baser parts of the mixture, it takes to 
produce a moderate quantity of literature. Smaller 
people have conceivably ceased to count; but it is 
strange for a member of the generation immediately 
succeeding her own that she should have had the 
same fate as smaller people: all the more that such 
a mourner may be ruefully conscious of contributing 
not a little himself to the mishap. Does he still read, 
re-read, can he to-day at all deal with, this wonderful 
lady's novels ? It only half cheers him up that on the 



192 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

occasion of such a publication as I here speak of he 
finds himself as much interested as ever. 

The grounds of the interest are difficult to give — 
they presuppose so much of the old impression. If 
the old impression therefore requires some art to sus- 
tain and justify itself we must be content, so far as we 
are still under the charm, to pass, though only at the 
worst, for eccentric. The work, whether we still hold 
fast to it or not, has twenty qualities and would still 
have an immense one if it had only its style; but what 
I suppose it has paid for in the long-run is its want of 
plastic intensity. Does any work of representation, 
of imitation, live long that is predominantly loose ? 
It may live in spite of looseness; but that, we make out, 
is only because closeness has somewhere, where it has 
most mattered, played a part. It is hard to say of 
George Sand's productions, I think, that they show 
closeness anywhere; the sense of that fluidity which 
is more than fluency is what, in speaking of them, con- 
stantly comes back to us, and the sense of fluidity is 
fundamentally fatal to the sense of particular truth. 
The thing presented by intention is never the stream of 
the artist's inspiration; it is the deposit of the stream. 
For the things presented by George Sand, for the gen- 
eral picture, we must look elsewhere, look at her life 
and her nature, and find them in the copious docu- 
ments in which these matters and many others are 
now reflected. All this mass of evidence it is that 
constitutes the "intensity" we demand. The mass 
has little by little become large, and our obligation 
to Madame Karenine is that she makes it still larger. 
She sets our face, and without intending to, more and 
more in the right direction. Her injudicious analyses 



• 



GEORGE SAND 193 

of forgotten fictions only confirm our discrimination. 
We feel ourselves in the presence of the extraordinary 
author of the hundred tales, and yet also feel it to be 
not by reason of them that she now presents herself 
as one of the most remarkable of human creatures. 
By reason then of what ? Of everything that deter- 
mined, accompanied, surrounded their appearance. 
They formed all together a great feature in a career 
and a character, but the career and the character are 
the real thing. 

Such is far from usually the case, I hasten to recog- 
nise, with the complete and consistent artist. Poor 
is the art, a thing positively to be ashamed of, that, 
generally speaking, is not far more pressing for this 
servant of the altar than anything else, anything out- 
side the church, can possibly be. To have been the 
tempered and directed hammer that makes the metal 
hard: if that be not good enough for such a ministrant, 
we may know him by whatever he has found better 
— we shall not know him by the great name. The 
immense anomaly in Madame Sand was that she freely 
took the form of being, with most zest, quite another 
sort of hammer. It testifies sufficiently to her large 
endowment that, given the wide range of the rest of 
her appetite, she should seem to us to-day to have 
sacrificed even superficially to any form of objective 
expression. She had in spite of herself an imagina- 
tion almost of the first order, which overflowed and 
irrigated, turning by its mere swift current, without 
effort, almost without direction, every mill it encoun- 
tered, and launching as it went alike the lightest skiff 
and the stateliest ship. She had in especial the gift 
of speech, speech supreme and inspired, to which we 



i 9 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

particularly owe the high value of the "case" she pre- 
sents. For the case was definitely a bold and direct 
experiment, not at all in "art," not at all in literature, 
but conspicuously and repeatedly in the business of 
living; so that our profit of it is before anything else 
that it was conscious, articulate, vivid — recorded, re- 
flected, imaged. The subject of the experiment be- 
came also at first hand the journalist — much of her 
work being simply splendid journalism — commissioned 
to bring it up to date. She interviewed nobody else, 
but she admirably interviewed herself, and this is 
exactly our good fortune. Her autobiography, her 
letters, her innumerable prefaces, all her expansive 
parentheses and excursions, make up the generous 
report. We have in this form accordingly a literary 
title for her far superseding any derived from her 
creative work. But that is the result of a mere be- 
trayal, not the result of an intention. Her master- 
piece, by a perversity of fate, is the thing she least sat 
down to. It consists — since she is a case — in the mere 
notation of her symptoms, in help given to the study 
of them. To this has the author of "Consuelo" come. 

But how in the world indeed was the point so in- 
dicated not to be the particular cross-road at which the 
critic should lie in wait for a poor child of the age 
whom preceding ages and generations had almost in- 
fernally conspired to trap for him, to give up, candidly 
astray, to his hands ? If the element of romance for 
which our heroine's name stands is best represented 
by her personal sequences and solutions, it is sufficiently 
visible that her heredity left her a scant alternative. 
Space fails me for the story of this heredity, queer and 
complicated, the very stuff that stories are made of — 



GEORGE SAND 195 

a chain of generations succeeding each other in con- 
fidence and joy and with no aid asked of legal or other 
artificial sanctions. The facts are, moreover, suffi- 
ciently familiar, though here as elsewhere Madame 
Karenine adds to our knowledge. Presented, fore- 
shortened, stretching back from the quiet Nohant 
funeral of 1876 to the steps of the throne of King 
Augustus the Strong of Poland, father of Maurice de 
Saxe, great-great-grandfather of Aurore Dupin, it all 
hangs together as a cluster of components more provoc- 
ative than any the great novelist herself ever handled. 
Her pre-natal past was so peopled with dramatis 
persons that her future was really called on to supply 
them in such numbers as would preserve the balance. 
The tide of illegitimacy sets straight through the 
series. No one to speak of — Aurore's father is an ex- 
ception — seems to have had a "regular'' paternity. 
Aurore herself squared with regularity but by a month 
or two; the marriage of her parents gave her a bare 
escape. She was brought up by her paternal grand- 
mother between a son of her father and a daughter of 
her mother born out of wedlock. It all moves before 
us as a vivid younger world, a world on the whole more 
amused and more amusing than ours. The period 
from the Restoration to the events of 1848 is the 
stretch of time in which, for more reasons than we can 
now go into, French life gives out to those to whom 
its appeal never fails most of its charm — most, at all 
events, of its ancient sociability. Happy is our sense 
of the picturesque Paris unconscious of a future all 
"avenues" and exhibitions; happy our sense of these 
middle years of a great generation, easy and lusty 
despite the ensanguined spring that had gone before. 
They live again, piecing themselves ever so pleasantly 



196 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

and strangely together, in Madame Sand's records 
and references; almost as much as the conscious close 
of the old regime so vaunted by Talleyrand they strike 
us as a season it would have been indispensable to 
know for the measure of what intercourse could richly 
be. 

The time was at any rate unable to withhold from 
the wonderful young person growing up at Nohant 
the conditions she was so freely to use as measures of 
her own. Though the motto of her autobiography 
is Wahrheit und Dichtung quite as much as it had been 
that of Goethe's, there is a truth beyond any pro- 
jected by her more regular compositions in her evoca- 
tion of the influences of her youth. Upon these in- 
fluences Madame Karenine, who has enjoyed access 
through her heroine's actual representatives to much 
evidence hitherto unpublished, throws a hundred 
interesting lights. Madame Dupin de Francueil and 
Madame Dupin the younger survive and perform for 
us, "convince" us as we say, better than any Lelia 
or any Consuelo. Our author's whole treatment of 
her remarkable mother's figure and history conve- 
niently gives the critic the pitch of the great fact about 
her — the formation apparently at a given moment, 
yet in very truth, we may be sure, from far back, of 
the capacity and the determination to live with high 
consistency for herself. What she made of this re- 
solve to allow her nature all its chances and how she 
carried on the process — these things are, thanks to the 
immense illustration her genius enabled her to lend 
them, the essence of her story; of which the full 
adumbration is in the detached pictorial way she 
causes her mother to live for us. Motherhood, daugh- 



GEORGE SAND 197 

terhood, childhood, embarrassed maturity, were phe- 
nomena she early encountered in her great adventure, 
and nothing is more typical of her energy and sincerity 
than the short work we can scarce help feeling she 
makes of them. It is not that she for a moment 
blinks or dodges them; she weaves them straight in 
— embarks with them indeed as her principal baggage. 
We know to-day from the pages before us everything 
we need to know about her marriage and the troubled 
years that followed; about M. Casimir Dudevant 
and his possible points of view, about her separation, 
her sharp secession, rather, as it first presents itself, 
and her discovery, at a turn of the road as it can only 
be called, of her genius. 

She stumbled on this principle, we see, quite by 
accident and as a consequence of the attempt to do the 
very humblest labour, to support herself from day to 
day. It would be difficult to put one's finger more 
exactly upon a case of genius unaided and unprompted. 
She embarked, as I have called it, on her great voyage 
with no grounds of confidence whatever; she had 
obscurely, unwittingly the spirit of Columbus, but not 
so much even as his exiguous outfit. She found her 
gift of improvisation, found her tropic wealth, by leap- 
ing — a surprised conquistador of "style" — straight upon 
the coral strand. No awakened instinct, probably, was 
ever such a blessing to a writer so much in need. This 
instinct was for a long time all her initiation, practi- 
cally all her equipment. The curious thing is that 
she never really arrived at the fruit of it as the result 
of a process, but that she started with the whole thing 
as a Patti or a Mario starts with a voice which is a 
method, which is music, and that it was simply the 



i 9 8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

train in which she travelled. It was to render her 
as great a service as any supreme faculty ever ren- 
dered its possessor, quite the same service as the stra- 
tegic eye renders a commander in the field or instant 
courage the attacking soldier: it was to carry her 
through life still more inimitably than through the 
career of authorship. Her books are all rich and 
resonant with it, but they profit by it meagrely com- 
pared with her character. She walks from first to 
last in music, that is in literary harmonies, of her own 
making, and it is in truth sometimes only, with her 
present biographer to elbow us a little the way, that 
these triumphant sounds permit us a near enough 
approach to the procession to make out quite exactly 
its course. 

No part of her career is to my sense so curious as 
this particular sudden bound into the arena. Noth- 
ing but the indescribable heredity I have spoken of 
appears traceably to have prepared it. We have on 
one side the mere poverty and provinciality of her 
marriage and her early contacts, the crudity of her 
youth and her ignorance (which included so small a 
view of herself that she had begun by looking for a 
future in the bedaubing, for fancy-shops, of little 
boxes and fans) ; and on the other, at a stride, the full- 
blown distinction of "Valentine" and "Jacques," 
which had had nothing to lead up to it, we seem to 
make out, but the very rough sketch of a love-affair 
with M. Jules Sandeau. I spoke just now of the pos- 
sible points of view of poor M. Dudevant; at which, 
had we space, it might be of no small amusement to 
glance — of an amusement indeed large and suggestive. 
We see him, surely, in the light of these records, as the 



GEORGE SAND 199 

most "sold" husband in literature, and not at all, one 
feels, by his wife's assertion of her freedom, but sim- 
ply by her assertion of her mind. He appears to 
have married her for a nobody approved and guaran- 
teed, and he found her, on his hands, a sister, as we 
have seen, of Goethe — unless it be but a figure to say 
that he ever "found" her anything. He appears to 
have lived to an advanced age without having really 
— in spite of the lawsuits he lost — comprehended his 
case; not the least singular feature of which had in 
fact positively been the deceptive delay of his fate. 
It was not till after several years of false calm that it 
presented itself in its special form. We see him and his 
so ruthlessly superseded name, never to be gilded by 
the brilliant event, we see him reduced, like a leaf in a 
whirlwind, to a mere vanishing-point. 

We deal here, I think, with something very differ- 
ent from the usual tittle-tattle about "private" rela- 
tions, for the simple reason that we deal with relations 
foredoomed to publicity by the strange economy in- 
volved in the play of genius itself. Nothing was ever 
less wasted, from beginning to end, than all this amo- 
rous experience and all this luxury of woe. The parties 
to it were to make an inveterate use of it, the principal 
party most of all; and what therefore on that marked 
ground concerns the critic is to see what they were ap- 
preciably to get out of it. The principal party, the 
constant one through all mutations, was alone qual- 
ified to produce the extract that affects us as final. 
It was by the publication four years since of her letters 
to Alfred de Musset and to Sainte-Beuve, by the ap- 
pearance also of Madame Arvede Barine's clear com- 
pact biography of Musset, that we began to find her 



2oo NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

personal history brought nearer to us than her own 
communications had in her lifetime already brought it. 
The story of her relations with Musset is accordingly 
so known that I need only glance at the fact of her 
having — shortly after the highest degree of intimacy 
between them had, in the summer of 1833, established 
itself in Paris — travelled with him to Italy, settled 
with him briefly in Venice, and there passionately 
quarrelled and parted with him — only, however, sev- 
eral months later, on their return to France, to renew 
again, to quarrel and to part again, all more passion- 
ately, if possible, even than before. Madame Karenine, 
besides supplying us with all added light on this 
episode, keeps us abreast of others that were to follow, 
leaves us no more in the dark about Michel de Bourges, 
Felicien Mallefille and Chopin than we had already 
been left about their several predecessors. She is 
commendably lucid on the subject of Franz Liszt, 
impartially examines the case and authoritatively 
dismisses it. Her second volume brings her heroine 
to the eve of the historic departure with Chopin for 
Majorca. We have thus in a convenient form enough 
for one mouthful of entertainment, as well as for 
superabundant reflection. 

We have indeed the whole essence of what most 
touches us, for this consists not at all of the quantity 
of the facts, nor even of their oddity: they are prac- 
tically all there from the moment the heroine's general 
attitude defines itself. That is the solid element — 
the details to-day are smoke. Yet I hasten to add 
that it was in particular by taking her place of an au- 
tumn evening in the southward-moving diligence with 
Alfred de Musset, it was on this special occasion that 



GEORGE SAND 201 

she gave most the measure of her choice of the con- 
sistent, even though it so little meant the consequent, 
life. She had reached toward such a life obviously 
in quitting the conjugal roof in 183 1 — had attacked 
the experiment clumsily, but according to her light, 
by throwing herself on such material support as fac- 
ulties yet untested might furnish, and on such moral 
as several months of the intimite of Jules Sandeau and 
a briefer taste of that of Prosper Merimee might fur- 
ther contribute. She had done, in other words, what 
she could; subsequent lights show it as not her fault 
that she had not done better. With Musset her 
future took a long stride; emotionally speaking it 
"looked up." Nothing was wanting in this case — 
independently of what might then have appeared her 
friend's equal genius — quite ideally to qualify it. He 
was several years her junior, and as she had her hus- 
band and her children, he had, in the high degree of 
most young Frenchmen of sensibility, his mother. It 
is recorded that with this lady on the eve of the cel- 
ebrated step she quite had the situation, as the phrase 
is, out; which is a note the more in the general, the 
intellectual lucidity. The only other note in fact to 
be added is that of the absence of funds for the under- 
taking. Neither partner had a penny to spare; the 
plan was wholly to "make money," on a scale, as they 
went. A great deal was in the event, exactly speak- 
ing, to be made — but the event was at the time far from 
clear to them. The enterprise was in consequence 
purely and simply, with a rounded perfection that 
gives it its value for the critic, an affair of the heart. 
That the heart, taking it as a fully representative 
organ, should fail of no good occasion completely and 
consistently to engage itself was the definite and, as 



202 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

appeared, the promising assumption on which every- 
thing rested. The heart was real life, frank, fearless, 
intelligent and even, so far as might be, intelligible 
life; everything else was stupid as well as poor, mud- 
dle as well as misery. The heart of course might be 
misery, for nothing was more possible than that life 
predominantly was; but it was at all events the misery 
that is least ignoble. 

This was the basis of Madame Sand's personal 
evolution, of her immense moral energy, for many a 
year; it was a practical system, applied and reapplied, 
and no " inquiry" concerning her has much point save 
as settling what, for our enlightenment and our es- 
teem, she made of it. The answer meets us, I think, 
after we have taken in the facts, promptly enough and 
with great clearness, so long as we consider that it is 
not, that it cannot be in the conditions, a simple one. 
She made of it then intellectually a splendid living, 
but she was able to do this only because she was an 
altogether exceptional example of our human stuff. 
It is here that her famous heredity comes in: we see 
what a race-accumulation of "toughness" had been 
required to build her up. Monstrous monarchs and 
bastards of kings, great generals and bastards of 
bastards, courtesans, dancers supple and hard, accom- 
plished men and women of the old dead great world, 
seasoned young soldiers of the Imperial epic, grisettes 
of the pave de Paris, Parisian to the core; the mixture 
was not quite the blood of people in general, and ob- 
viously such a final flower of such a stem might well 
fix the attention and appeal to the vigilance of those 
qualified to watch its development. These persons 
would, doubtless, however, as a result of their obser- 






GEORGE SAND 203 

vation, have acquired betimes a sense of the high 
vitality of their young friend. Formed essentially for 
independence and constructed for resistance and sur- 
vival she was to be trusted, as I have hinted, to take 
care of herself: this was always the residuary fact when 
a passion was spent. She took care of Musset, she 
took care of Chopin, took care, in short, through her 
career, of a whole series of nurslings, but never failed, 
under the worst ingratitude, to be by her own elasticity 
still better taken care of. This is why we call her 
anomalous and deprecate any view of her success that 
loses sight of the anomaly. The success was so great 
that but for the remainder she would be too encourag- 
ing. She was one in a myriad, and the cluster of cir- 
cumstances is too unlikely to recur. 

It is by her success, none the less, we must also re- 
member, that we know her; it is this that makes her 
interesting and calls for study. She had all the illu- 
mination that sensibility, that curiosity, can give, and 
that so ingeniously induces surrender to it; but the too 
numerous weaknesses, vulgarities and penalties of ad- 
venture and surrender she had only in sufficient degree 
to complete the experience before they shaped them- 
selves into the eloquence into which she could always 
reascend. Her eloquence — it is the simplest way to 
explain her — fairly made her success; and eloquence 
is superlatively rare. When passion can always de- 
pend upon it to vibrate passion becomes to that extent 
action, and success is nothing but action repeated and 
confirmed. In Madame Sand's particular case the 
constant recurrence of the malady of passion promoted 
in the most extraordinary way the superior appearance, 
the general expression, of health. It is of course not 



2o 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

to be denied that there are in her work infirmities and 
disfigurements, odd smutches even, or unwitting droll- 
eries, which show a sense on some sides enfeebled. 
The sense of her characters themselves for instance is 
constantly a confused one; they are too often at sea 
as to what is possible and what impossible for what 
we roughly call decent people. Her own categories, 
loose and liberal, are yet ever positive enough; when 
they err it is by excess of indulgence and by absence 
of the humorous vision, a nose for the ridiculous — the 
fatal want, this last almost always, we are reminded, 
the heel of Achilles, in the sentimental, the romantic 
estimate. The general validity of her novels, at any 
rate, I leave impugned, and the feature I have just 
noted in them is but one of the points at which they 
fail of reality. I stick to the history of her personal 
experiment, as the now so numerous documents show 
it; for it is here, and here only, that her felicity is 
amusing and confounding; amusing by the quaintness 
of some of the facts exposed, and yet confounding by 
reason of the beauty mixed with them. 

The "affair" with Musset for example has come to 
figure, thanks to the talent of both parties, as one of 
the great affairs in the history of letters; and yet on 
the near view of it now enjoyed we learn that it 
dragged out scarce more than a year. Even this 
measure indeed is excessive, so far as any measure 
serves amid so much that is incoherent. It supposed 
itself to have dropped for upwards of six months, 
during which another connection, another imperious 
heart-history, reigned in its stead. The enumeration 
of these trifles is not, I insist, futile; so that while we 
are about it we shall find an interest in being clear. 



GEORGE SAND 205 

The events of Venice, with those that immediately pre- 
ceded and followed them, distinctly repay inspection 
as an epitome, taken together, of the usual process. 
They appear to contain, as well as an intensity all 
their own, the essence of all that of other occasions. 
The young poet and the young novelist met then, 
appear to have met for the first time, toward the end 
of June 1833, and to have become finally intimate in 
the month of August of that year. They started to- 
gether for Italy at the beginning of the winter and 
were settled — if settled be not too odd a word to use — 
by the end of January in Venice. I neglect the ques- 
tion of Musset's serious illness there, though it is not 
the least salient part of the adventure, and observe 
simply that by the end of March he had started to 
return to Paris, while his friend, remaining behind, 
had yielded to a new affection. This new affection, 
the connection with Pietro Pagello, dates unmistak- 
ably from before Musset's departure; and, with the 
completion of "Jacques" and the composition of the 
beautiful "Andre," the wonderful "Leone-Leoni" and 
some of the most interesting of the "Lettres d'un 
Voyageur," constituted the main support of our hero- 
ine during the spring and early summer. By midsum- 
mer she had left Italy with Pagello, and they arrive in 
Paris on August 14th. This arrival marks imme- 
diately the term of their relations, which had by that 
time lasted some six or seven months. Pagello returned 
to Italy, and if they ever met again it was the merest 
of meetings and after long years. 

In October, meanwhile, the connection with Musset 
was renewed, and renewed — this is the great point — 
because the sentiments still entertained by each (in 



206 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

spite of Pagello, in spite of everything) are stronger 
even than any awkwardness of which either might have 
been conscious. The whole business really is one in 
which we lose our measure alike of awkwardness and 
of grace. The situation is in the hands of comedy — 
or would be, I should rather say, were it not so dis- 
tinctly predestined to fall, as I have noted, into those 
of the nobler form. It is prolonged till the following 
February, we make out, at furthest, and only after 
having been more than once in the interval threatened 
with violent extinction. It bequeaths us thus in a 
handful of dates a picture than which probably none 
other in the annals of " passion" was ever more sug- 
gestive. The passion is of the kind that is called 
"immortal" — and so called, wonderful to say, with 
infinite reason and justice. The poems, the letters, 
the diaries, the novels, the unextinguished accents 
and lingering echoes that commemorate it are among 
the treasures of the human imagination. The lit- 
erature of the world is appreciably the richer for it. 
The noblest forms, in a word, on both sides, marked 
it for their own; it was born, according to the adage, 
with a silver spoon in its mouth. It was an affection 
in short transcendent and sublime, and yet the critic 
sees it come and go before he can positively turn 
round. The brief period of some seventeen or eight- 
een months not only affords it all its opportunity, but 
places comfortably in its lap a relation founded on the 
same elements and yet wholly distinct from it. Mus- 
set occupied in fact but two-thirds of his mistress's 
time. Pagello overlapped him because Pagello also 
appealed to the heart; but Pagello's appeal to the heart 
was disposed of as expeditiously. Musset, in the same 
way, succeeded Pagello at the voice of a similar appeal, 



GEORGE SAND 207 

and this claim, in its turn, was polished off in yet 
livelier fashion. 

Liveliness is of course the tune of the "gay" career; 
it has always been supposed to relegate to comedy the 
things to which it puts its mark — so that as a series of 
sequences amenable mainly to satire the approxima- 
tions I have made would fall neatly into place. The 
anomaly here, as on other occasions of the same sort 
depicted in Madame Karenine's volumes, is that the 
facts, as we are brought near to them, strike us as so 
out of relation to the beautiful tone. The effect and 
the achieved dignity are those of tragedy — tragedy 
rearranging, begetting afresh, in its own interest, all 
the elements of ecstasy and despair. How can it not 
be tragedy when this interest is just the interest, which 
I have touched on, of exemplary eloquence ? There 
are lights in which the material, with its want of noble- 
ness, want of temper, want even of manners, seems 
scarcely life at all, as the civilised conscience under- 
stands life; and yet it is as the most magnanimous of 
surrenders to life that the whole business is trium- 
phantly reflected in the documents. It is not only that 
"La Nuit d'Octobre" is divine, that Madame Sand's 
letters are superb and that nothing can exceed, in par- 
ticular, the high style of the passage that we now per- 
ceive Musset to have borrowed from one of them for 
insertion in "On ne Badine pas avec l'Amour" — to the 
extreme profit of the generation which was, for many 
years thereafter, to hear Delaunay exquisitely declaim 
it at the Theatre Francais; it is that, strange to say, 
almost the finest flower of the bouquet is the now- 
famous written "declaration" addressed to Pagello one 
evening by the lady. Musset was ill in bed; he was the 



2o8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

attendant doctor; and while, watching and ignorant 
of French, he twirled his thumbs or dipped into a book, 
his patient's companion, on the other side of the table 
and with the lamp between them, dashed off (it took 
time) a specimen of her finest prose, which she then 
folded and handed to him, and which, for perusal more 
at leisure, he carried off in his pocket. It proved 
neither more nor less than one of the pontoon bridges 
which a force engaged in an active campaign holds 
itself ready at any time to throw across a river, and 
was in fact of its kind a stout and beautiful structure. 
It happily spanned at all events the gulf of a short 
acquaintance. 

The incident bears a family resemblance to another 
which our biographer finds in her path in the year 1837. 
Having to chronicle the close of the relation with 
Michel de Bourges, from which again her heroine had 
so much to suffer, she has also to mention that this 
catastrophe was precipitated, to all appearance, by 
the contemporaneous dawn of an affection "plus 
douce, moins enthousiaste, moins apre aussi, et j'es- 
pere plus durable. ,, The object of this affection was 
none other than the young man then installed at 
Nohant as preceptor to Madame Sand's children — 
but as to whom in the event we ask ourselves what by 
this time her notion of measure or durability can have 
become. It is just this element that has positively 
least to do, we seem to make out, with "affection" as 
so practised. Affection in any sense worth speaking 
of is durability; and it is the repeated impermanence 
of those manifestations of it on behalf of which the 
high horse of "passion" is ridden so hard that makes us 
wonder whether such loves and such licences, in spite 



GEORGE SAND 209 

of the quality of free experience they represent, had 
really anything to do with it. It was surely the last 
thing they contained. Felicien Mallefille may be, 
to his heart's content, of 1837 and even of a portion 
of 1838; it is Chopin who is of the rest of the year 
and — let us hope our biographer will have occasion to 
show us — of at least the whole of the following. It is 
here that, as I have mentioned, she pauses. 

One of the most interesting contributions to her 
subject is the long letter from Balzac to his future 
wife, Madame Hanska, now reproduced in the most 
substantial of the few volumes of his correspondence 
("Lettres a l'Etrangere, 183 3-1 842," published 1899) 
and printed by Madame Karenine. The author, find- 
ing himself near Nohant in the spring of 1838, went 
over to pay his illustrious colleague a visit and spent 
more than a day in sustained conversation with her. 
He had the good fortune to find her alone, so that they 
could endlessly talk and smoke by the fire, and nothing 
can be all at once more vivid, more curious and more 
judicious than his immediate report of the occasion. 
It lets into the whole question of his hostess's character 
and relations— inevitably more or less misrepresented 
by the party most involved — air and light and truth; 
it fixes points and re-establishes proportions. It shows 
appearances confronted, in a word, with Balzac's 
strong sense of the real and offers the grateful critic 
still another chance to testify for that precious gift. 
This same critic's mind, it must be added, rests with 
complacency on the vision thus evoked, the way that 
for three days, from five o'clock in the afternoon till 
five in the morning, the wonderful friends must have 
had things out. For once, we feel sure, fundamental 



2io NOTES ON NOVELISTS 






questions were not shirked. As regards his comrade 
at any rate Balzac puts his finger again and again on 
the truth and the idiosyncrasy. "She is not aimable 
and in consequence will always find it difficult to be 
loved. " He adds — and it is here that he comes nearest 
straightening the question — that she has in character 
all the leading marks of the man and as few as possible 
those of his counterpart. He implies that, though 
judged as a woman she may be puzzling enough, she 
hangs together perfectly if judged as a man. She is 
a man, he repeats, "and all the more that she wants 
to be, that she has sunk the woman, that she isn't 
one. Women attract, and she repels; and, as I am 
much of a man, if this is the efFect she produces on me 
she must produce it on men who are like me — so that 
she will always be unhappy." He qualifies as justly, 
I may parenthesise, her artistic side, the limits of which, 
he moreover intimates, she had herself expressed to 
him. "She has neither intensity of conception, nor 
the constructive gift, nor the faculty of reaching the 
truth" — Balzac's own deep dye of the truth — "nor 
the art of the pathetic. But she holds that, without 
knowing the French language, she has style. And 
it's true." 

The light of mere evidence, the light of such re- 
searches as Madame Karenine's, added to her so 
copious correspondence and autobiography, makes 
Madame Sand so much of a riddle that we grasp at 
Balzac's authoritative word as at an approach to a 
solution. It is, strange to say, by reading another 
complexity into her image that we finally simplify it. 
The riddle consists in the irreconcilability of her dis- 
tinction and her vulgarity. Vulgar somehow in spite 



GEORGE SAND 211 

of everything is the record of so much taking and 
tasting and leaving, so much publicity and palpability 
of "heart," so much experience reduced only to the 
terms of so many more or less greasy males. And not 
only vulgar but in a manner grotesque — from the mo- 
ment, that is, that the experience is presented to us 
with any emphasis in the name of terror and pity. It 
was not a passive but an active situation, that of a 
nature robust and not too fastidious, full at all times 
of resistance and recovery. No history gives us really 
more ground to protest against the new fashion, rife 
in France, of transporting "love," as there mainly 
represented, to the air of morals and of melancholy. 
The fashion betrays only the need to rejuvenate, at a 
considerable cost of falsity, an element in connection 
with which levity is felt either to have exhausted itself 
or to look thin as a motive. It is in the light of levity 
that many of the facts presented by Madame Karenine 
are most intelligible, and that is the circumstance 
awkward for sensibility and for all the graces it is 
invited to show. 

The scene quite changes when we cease to expect 
these graces. As a man Madame Sand was admirable 
— especially as a man of the dressing-gown and slip- 
pers order, easy of approach and of tutoiement, rubbing 
shoulders with queer company and not superstitiously 
haunted by the conception of the gentleman. There 
have been many men of genius, delightful, prodigal 
and even immortal, who squared but scantly with that 
conception, and it is a company to which our heroine 
is simply one of the most interesting of recruits. She 
has in it all her value and loses none of her charm. 
Above all she becomes in a manner comprehensible, as 



212 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

any frank Bohemian is comprehensible. We have 
only to imagine the Bohemian really endowed, the 
Bohemian, that is, both industrious and wise, to get 
almost all her formula. She keeps here and there a 
feminine streak — has at moments an excess of volu- 
bility and too great an insistence on having been in 
the right; but for the rest, as Balzac says, the char- 
acter, confronted with the position, is an explanation. 
"Son male," he tells Madame Hanska, "etait rare" — 
than which nothing could have been more natural. 
Yet for this masculine counterpart — so difficult to find 
— she ingenuously spent much of her early life in look- 
ing. That the search was a mistake is what consti- 
tutes, in all the business of which the Musset episode 
is the type, the only, the real melancholy, the real 
moral tragedy. 

For all such mistakes, none the less, the whole les- 
son of the picture is precisely in the disconcerting suc- 
cess of her system. Everything was at the start against 
that presumption; but everything at the end was to 
indicate that she was not to have been defeated. 
Others might well have been, and the banks of the 
stream of her career are marked, not invisibly, with 
mouldering traces of the less lucky or the less buoyant; 
but her attitude as life went on was more and more 
that of showing how she profited of all things for wis- 
dom and sympathy, for a general expertness and 
nobleness. These forces, all clarified to an admirable 
judgment, kept her to the last day serene and superior, 
and they are one of the reasons why the monument 
before us is felt not to be misplaced. There should 
always be a monument to those who have achieved a 
prodigy. What greater prodigy than to have be- 



GEORGE SAND 213 

queathed in such mixed elements, to have principally 
made up of them, the affirmation of an unprecedented 
intensity of life ? For though this intensity was one 
that broke down in each proposed exhibition the gen- 
eral example remains, incongruously, almost the best 
we can cite. And all we can say is that this brings 
us back once more to the large manner, the exceptional 
energy and well-nigh monstrous vitality, of the individ- 
ual concerned. Nothing is so absurd as a half-dis- 
guise, and Madame Sand's abiding value will probably 
be in her having given her sex, for its new evolution 
and transformation, the real standard and measure of 
change. This evolution and this transformation are 
all round us unmistakable; the change is in the air; 
women are turned more and more to looking at life as 
men look at it and to getting from it what men get. 
In this direction their aim has been as yet compar- 
atively modest and their emulation low; the chal- 
lenge they have hitherto picked up is but the challenge 
of the "average" male. The approximation of the 
extraordinary woman has been practically, in other 
words, to the ordinary man. George Sand's service 
is that she planted the flag much higher — her own 
approximation at least was to the extraordinary. She 
reached him, she surpassed him, and she showed how, 
with native dispositions, the thing could be done. So 
far as we have come these new records will live as the 
precious text-book of the business. 



GEORGE SAND 
1914 

It has much occurred to us, touching those further 
liberations of the subordinate sex which fill our ears 
just now with their multitudinous sound, that the pro- 
moters of the great cause make a good deal less than 
they might of one of their very first contentious 
"assets," if it may not indeed be looked at as quite 
the first; and thereby fail to pass about, to the gen- 
eral elation, a great vessel of truth. Is this because 
the life and example of George Sand are things un- 
known or obscure to the talkers and fighters of to-day 
— present and vivid as they were to those of the last 
mid-century, or because of some fear that to invoke 
victory in her name might, for particular, for even 
rueful reasons, not be altogether a safe course ? It is 
difficult to account otherwise for the fact that so 
ample and embossed a shield, and one that shines too 
at last with a strong and settled lustre, is rather left 
hanging on the wall than seen to cover advances or 
ward off attacks in the fray. Certain it is that if a 
lapse of tradition appeared at one time to have left 
a little in the lurch the figure of the greatest of all 
women of letters, of Letters in truth most exactly, as 
we hold her surely to have been, that explanation 
should have begun to fail, some fourteen years ago, 
with the publication of the first volume of Madame 
Wladimir Karenine's biography, and even in spite of 
the fact that this singularly interesting work was not 

214 



GEORGE SAND 215 

till a twelvemonth ago to arrive at the dignity of a 
third, 1 which leaves it, for all its amplitude, still in- 
complete. The latest instalment, now before us, fol- 
lows its predecessors after an interval that had alarmed 
us not a little for the proper consummation; and the 
story is even now carried but to the eve of the Revolu- 
tion of 1848, after which its heroine (that of the Revo- 
lution, we may almost say, as well as of the narrative) 
was to have some twenty-seven years to live. Madame 
Karenine appears to be a Russian critic writing under 
a pseudonym; portions of her overbrimming study 
have appeared dispersedly, we gather, in Russian 
periodicals, but the harmonious French idiom, of which 
she is all-sufficient mistress, welds them effectively to- 
gether, and the result may already be pronounced a 
commemorative monument of all but the first order. 
The first order in such attempts has for its sign a 
faculty of selection and synthesis, not to say a sense of 
composition and proportion, which neither the chron- 
icler nor the critic in these too multiplied pages is able 
consistently to exhibit; though on the other hand they 
represent quite the high-water mark of patience and 
persistence, of the ideal biographic curiosity. They 
enjoy further the advantage of the documented state 
in a degree that was scarce to have been hoped for, 
every source of information that had remained in re- 
serve — and these proved admirably numerous — having 
been opened to our inquirer by the confidence of the 
illustrious lady's two great-granddaughters, both alive 
at the time the work was begun. Add to this that 
there has grown up in France a copious George Sand 
literature, a vast body of illustrative odds and ends, 

1 George Sand, sa Vie et ses CEuvres, vol. iii. (1838-1848). Par Wladimir 
Karenine. Paris, Plon, 1912. 



216 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

relics and revelations, on which the would-be prop- 
agator of the last word is now free to draw — always 
with discrimination. Ideally, well-nigh overwhelm- 
ingly informed we may at present therefore hold our- 
selves; and were that state all that is in question for 
us nothing could exceed our advantage. 



Just the beauty and the interest of the case are, 
however, that such a condition by no means exhausts 
our opportunity, since in no like connection could it 
be less said that to know most is most easily or most 
complacently to conclude. May we not decidedly feel 
the sense and the "lesson," the suggestive spread, of 
a career as a thing scarce really to be measured when 
the effect of more and more acquaintance with it is 
simply to make the bounds of appreciation recede ? 
This is why the figure now shown us, blazed upon to 
the last intensity by the lamplight of investigation, 
and with the rank oil consumed in the process fairly 
filling the air, declines to let us off from an hour of 
that contemplation which yet involves discomfiture 
for us so long as certain lucidities on our own part, 
certain serenities of assurance, fail correspondingly to 
play up. We feel ourselves so outfaced, as it were; 
we somehow want in any such case to meet and match 
the assurances with which the subject himself or her- 
self immitigably bristles, and are nevertheless by no 
means certain that our bringing up premature forces 
or trying to reply with lights of our own may not check 
the current of communication, practically without 
sense for us unless flowing at its fullest. At our biog- 
rapher's rate of progress we shall still have much to 



GEORGE SAND 217 

wait for; but it can meanwhile not be said that we 
have not plenty to go on with. To this may be added 
that the stretch of "life," apart from the more con- 
crete exhibition, already accounted for by our three 
volumes (if one may discriminate between "produc- 
tion" and life to a degree that is in this connection 
exceptionally questionable), represents to all appear- 
ance the most violently and variously agitated face 
of the career. The establishment of the Second 
Empire ushered in for Madame Sand, we seem in 
course of preparation to make out, the long period 
already more or less known to fame, that is to crit- 
icism, as the period of her great placidity, her more 
or less notorious appeasement; a string of afternoon 
hours as hazily golden as so many reigns of Antonines, 
when her genius had mastered the high art of acting 
without waste, when a happy play of inspiration had 
all the air, so far as our spectatorship went, of filling 
her large capacity and her beautiful form to the brim, 
and when the gathered fruit of what she had daunt- 
lessly done and been heaped itself upon her table as 
a rich feast for memory and philosophy. So she came 
in for the enjoyment of all the sagesse her contempo- 
raries (with only such exceptions as M. Paul de Mus- 
set and Madame Louise Colet and the few discordant 
pleaders for poor Chopin) finally rejoiced on their side 
to acclaim; the sum of her aspects "composing," ar- 
ranging themselves in relation to each other, with a 
felicity that nothing could exceed and that swept with 
great glosses and justifications every aspect of the 
past. To few has it been given to "pay" so little, 
according to our superstition of payment, in proportion 
to such enormities of ostensibly buying or borrowing 
— which fact, we have to recognise, left an existence 



218 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

as far removed either from moral, or intellectual, or 
even social bankruptcy as if it had proceeded from 
the first but on the most saving lines. 

That is what remains on the whole most inimitable 
in the picture — the impression it conveys of an art of 
life by which the rough sense of the homely adage that 
we may not both eat our cake and have it was to be 
signally falsified; this wondrous mistress of the matter 
strikes us so as having consumed her refreshment, her 
vital supply, to the last crumb, so far as the provision 
meant at least freedom and ease, and yet having ever 
found on the shelf the luxury in question undiminished. 
Superlatively interesting the idea of how this result 
was, how it could be, achieved — given the world as 
we on our side of the water mainly know it; and it is 
as meeting the mystery that the monument before us 
has doubtless most significance. We shall presently see, 
in the light of our renewed occasion, how the question 
is solved; yet we may as well at once say that this will 
have had for its conclusion to present our heroine — 
mainly figuring as a novelist of the romantic or sen- 
timental order once pre-eminent but now of shrunken 
credit — simply as a supreme case of the successful 
practice of life itself. We have to distinguish for this 
induction after a fashion in which neither Madame 
Sand nor her historian has seemed at all positively 
concerned to distinguish; the indifference on the his- 
torian's part sufficiently indicated, we feel, by the com- 
placency with which, to be thorough, she explores 
even the most thankless tracts of her author's fictional 
activity, telling the tales over as she comes to them on 
much the same scale on which she unfolds the sit- 
uations otherwise documented. The writer of "Con- 



GEORGE SAND 219 

suelo" and "Claudie" and a hundred other things is 
to this view a literary genius whose output, as our 
current term so gracefully has it, the exercise of an 
inordinate personal energy happens to mark; whereas 
the exercise of personal energy is for ourselves what 
most reflects the genius — recorded though this again 
chances here to be through the inestimable fact of the 
possession of style. Of the action of that perfect, that 
only real preservative in face of other perils George 
Sand is a wondrous example; but her letters alone 
suffice to show it, and the style of her letters is no more 
than the breath of her nature, her so remarkable one, 
in which expression and aspiration were much the same 
function. That is what it is really to have style — 
when you set about performing the act of life. The 
forms taken by this latter impulse then cover every- 
thing; they serve for your adventures not less than 
they may serve at their most refined pitch for your 
Lelias and your Mauprats. 

This means accordingly, we submit, that those of us 
who at the present hour "feel the change," as the 
phrase is, in the computation of the feminine range, 
with the fullest sense of what it may portend, shirk 
at once our opportunity and our obligation in not 
squeezing for its last drop of testimony such an excep- 
tional body of illustration as we here possess. It has 
so much to say to any view — whether, in the light of 
old conventions, the brightest or the darkest — of what 
may either glitter or gloom in a conquest of every 
license by our contemporaries of the contending sex, 
that we scarce strain a point in judging it a provision 
of the watchful fates for this particular purpose and 
profit: its answers are so full to most of our uncer- 



220 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

tainties. It is to be noted of course that the creator 
of Lelia and of Mauprat was on the one hand a woman 
of an extraordinary gift and on the other a woman 
resignedly and triumphantly voteless — doing without 
that boon so beautifully, for free development and the 
acquisition and application of "rights," that we seem 
to see her sardonically smile, before our present tu- 
mults, as at a rumpus about nothing; as if women 
need set such preposterous machinery in motion for 
obtaining things which she had found it of the first 
facility, right and left, to stretch forth her hand and 
take. There it is that her precedent stands out— ap- 
parently to a blind generation; so that some little 
insistence on the method of her appropriations would 
seem to be peculiarly in place. It was a method that 
may be summed up indeed in a fairly simple, if compre- 
hensive, statement: it consisted in her dealing with 
life exactly as if she had been a man — exactly not 
being too much to say. Nature certainly had con- 
tributed on her behalf to this success; it had given her 
a constitution and a temperament, the kind of health, 
the kind of mind, the kind of courage, that might most 
directly help — so that she had but to convert these 
strong matters into the kind of experience. The 
writer of these lines remembers how a distinguished 
and intimate friend of her later years, who was a very 
great admirer, said of her to him just after her death 
that her not having been born a man seemed, when 
one knew her, but an awkward accident: she had been 
to all intents and purposes so fine and frank a specimen 
of the sex. This anomalous native turn, it may be 
urged, can have no general application — women can- 
not be men by the mere trying or by calling themselves 
"as good"; they must have been provided with what 



GEORGE SAND 221 

we have just noted as the outfit. The force of George 
Sand's exhibition consorts, we contend, none the less 
perfectly with the logic of the consummation awaiting 
us, if a multitude of signs are to be trusted, in a more 
or less near future: that effective repudiation of the 
distinctive, as to function and opportunity, as to work- 
ing and playing activity, for which the definite re- 
moval of immemorial disabilities is but another name. 
We are in presence already of a practical shrinkage of 
the distinctive, at the rapidest rate, and that it must 
shrink till nothing of it worth mentioning be left, 
what is this but a war-cry (presenting itself also indeed 
as a plea for peace) with which our ears are familiar ? 
Unless the suppression of the distinctive, however, is 
to work to the prejudice, as we may fairly call it, of 
men, drawing them over to the feminine type rather 
than drawing women over to theirs — which is not 
what seems most probable — the course of the business 
will be a virtual undertaking on the part of the half of 
humanity acting ostensibly for the first time in free- 
dom to annex the male identity, that of the other half, 
so far as may be at all contrivable, to its own cluster 
of elements. Individuals are in great world and race 
movements negligible, and if that undertaking must 
inevitably appeal to different recruits with a differing 
cogency, its really enlisting its army or becoming re- 
flected, to a perfectly conceivable vividness, in the 
mass, is all our demonstration requires. At that 
point begins the revolution, the shift of the emphasis 
from the idea of woman's weakness to the idea of her 
strength — which is where the emphasis has lain, from 
far back, by his every tradition, on behalf of man; 
and George Sand's great value, as we say, is that she 
gives us the vision, gives us the particular case, of the 



222 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

shift achieved, displayed with every assurance and 
working with every success. 

The answer of her life to the question of what an 
effective annexation of the male identity may amount 
to, amount to in favouring conditions certainly, but 
in conditions susceptible to the highest degree of en- 
couragement and cultivation, leaves nothing to be 
desired for completeness. This is the moral of her 
tale, the beauty of what she does for us — that at no 
point whatever of her history or her character do their 
power thus to give satisfaction break down; so that 
what we in fact on the whole most recognise is not the 
extension she gives to the feminine nature, but the 
richness that she adds to the masculine. It is not 
simply that she could don a disguise that gaped at 
the seams, that she could figure as a man of the mere 
carnival or pantomime variety, but that she made so 
virile, so efficient and homogeneous a one. Admir- 
able child of the old order as we find her, she was far 
from our late-coming theories and fevers — by the 
reason simply of her not being reduced to them; as 
to which nothing about her is more eloquent than her 
living at such ease with a conception of the main rel- 
evance of women that is viewed among ourselves as 
antiquated to "quaintness." She could afford the 
traditional and sentimental, the old romantic and his- 
toric theory of the function most natural to them, 
since she entertained it exactly as a man would. It is 
not that she fails again and again to represent her 
heroines as doing the most unconventional things — 
upon these they freely embark; but they never in the 
least do them for themselves, themselves as the "sex," 
they do them altogether for men. Nothing could well 



GEORGE SAND 223 

be more interesting thus than the extraordinary union 
of the pair of opposites in her philosophy of the rela- 
tion of the sexes — than the manner in which her im- 
mense imagination, the imagination of a man for range 
and abundance, intervened in the whole matter for 
the benefit, absolutely, of the so-called stronger party, 
or to liberate her sisters up to the point at which men 
may most gain and least lose by the liberation. She 
read the relation essentially in the plural term — the 
relations, and her last word about these was as far as 
possible from being that they are of minor importance 
to women. Nothing in her view could exceed their 
importance to women — it left every other far behind it; 
and nothing that could make for authority in her, no 
pitch of tone, no range of personal inquiry nor wealth 
of experience, no acquaintance with the question that 
might derive light from free and repeated adventure, 
but belonged to the business of driving this argument 
home. 

II 

Madame Karenine's third volume is copiously de- 
voted to the period of her heroine's intimacy with 
Chopin and to the events surrounding this agitated 
friendship, which largely fill the ten years precedent 
to '48. Our author is on all this ground overwhelmingly 
documented, and enlisted though she is in the service 
of the more successful party to the association — in the 
sense of Madame Sand's having heartily outlived and 
survived, not to say professionally and brilliantly 
"used," it — the great composer's side of the story 
receives her conscientious attention. Curious and 
interesting in many ways, these reflections of George 
Sand's middle life afford above all the most pointed 



224 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

illustration of the turn of her personal genius, her 
aptitude for dealing with men, in the intimate rela- 
tion, exactly after the fashion in which numberless 
celebrated men have contributed to their reputation, 
not to say crowned their claim to superiority, by deal- 
ing with women. This being above all the note of her 
career, with its vivid show of what such dealing could 
mean for play of mind, for quickening of gift, for gen- 
eral experience and, as we say, intellectual develop- 
ment, for determination of philosophic bent and 
education of character and fertilisation of fancy, we 
seem to catch the whole process in the fact, under the 
light here supplied us, as we catch it nowhere else. 
It gives us in this application endlessly much to con- 
sider — it is in itself so replete and rounded a show; 
we at once recognise moreover how comparatively 
little it matters that such works as "Lucrezia Flo- 
riani" and "Un Hiver a Majorque" should have pro- 
ceeded from it, cast into the shade as these are, on 
our biographer's evidence, by a picture of concom- 
itant energies still more attaching. It is not here by 
the force of her gift for rich improvisation, beautiful 
as this was, that the extraordinary woman holds us, 
but by the force of her ability to act herself out, given 
the astounding quantities concerned in this self. 
That energy too, we feel, was in a manner an improv- 
isation — so closely allied somehow are both the cur- 
rents, the flow of literary composition admirably in- 
stinctive and free, and the handling power, as we are 
constantly moved to call it, the flow of a splendid 
intelligence all the while at its fullest expressional ease, 
for the actual situations created by her, for whatever 
it might be that vitally confronted her. Of how to 
bring about, or at the least find one's self "in for," an 



GEORGE SAND 225 

inordinate number of situations, most of them of the 
last difficulty, and then deal with them on the spot, 
in the narrowest quarters as it were, with an eloquence 
and a plausibility that does them and one's own na- 
ture at once a sort of ideal justice, the demonstration 
here is the fullest — as of what it was further to have her 
unfailing verbal as well as her unfailing moral inspira- 
tion. What predicament could have been more of 
an hourly strain for instance, as we cannot but sup- 
pose, than her finding herself inevitably accompanied 
by her two children during the stay at Majorca made 
by Chopin in '38 under her protection ? The victory 
of assurance and of the handling power strikes us as 
none the less never an instant in doubt, that being 
essentially but over the general kind of inconvenience 
or embarrassment involved for a mother and a friend 
in any real consistency of attempt to carry things off 
male fashion. We do not, it is true, see a man as a 
mother, any more than we easily see a woman as a 
gentleman — and least of all perhaps in either case as 
an awkwardly placed one; but we see Madame Sand 
as a sufficiently bustling, though rather a rough and 
ready, father, a father accepting his charge and doing 
the best possible under the circumstances; the truth 
being of course that the circumstances never can be, 
even at the worst, or still at the best, the best for 
parental fondness, so awkward for him as for a mother. 

What call, again, upon every sort of presence of 
mind could have been livelier than the one made by 
the conditions attending and following the marriage 
of young Solange Dudevant to the sculptor Clesinger 
in 1846, when our heroine, summoned by the stress of 
events both to take responsible action and to rise to 



226 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

synthetic expression, in a situation, that is in presence 
of a series of demonstrations on her daughter's part, 
that we seem to find imaginable for a perfect dramatic 
adequacy only in that particular home circle, fairly 
surpassed herself by her capacity to "meet" every- 
thing, meet it much incommoded, yet undismayed, 
unabashed and unconfuted, and have on it all, to her 
great advantage, the always prodigious last word ? 
The elements of this especial crisis claim the more 
attention through its having been, as a test of her 
powers, decidedly the most acute that she was in her 
whole course of life to have traversed, more acute 
even, because more complicated, than the great oc- 
casion of her rupture with Alfred de Musset, at Venice 
in '35, on which such a wealth of contemplation and 
of ink has been expended. Dramatic enough in their 
relation to each other certainly those immortal cir- 
cumstances, immortal so far as immortalised on either 
side by genius and passion: Musset's return, ravaged 
and alone, to Paris; his companion's transfer of her 
favour to Pietro Pagello, whom she had called in to 
attend her friend medically in illness and whose inter- 
vention, so far from simplifying the juncture, com- 
plicated it in a fashion probably scarce paralleled in 
the history of the erotic relation; her retention of 
Pagello under her protection for the rest of her period 
in Venice; her marvellously domesticated state, in 
view of the literary baggage, the collection of social 
standards, even taking these but at what they were, 
and the general amplitude of personality, that she 
brought into residence with her; the conveyance of 
Pagello to Paris, on her own return, and the apparent 
signification to him at the very gate that her counte- 
nance was then and there withdrawn. This was a 



GEORGE SAND 227 

brilliant case for her — of coming off with flying colours; 
but it strikes us as a mere preliminary flourish of the 
bow or rough practice of scales compared to the high 
virtuosity which Madame Karenine's new material in 
respect to the latter imbroglio now enables us ever so 
gratefully to estimate. The protagonist's young chil- 
dren were in the Venetian crisis quite off the scene, and 
on occasions subsequent to the one we now glance at 
were old enough and, as we seem free to call it, initiated 
enough not to solicit our particular concern for them; 
whereas at the climax of the connection with Chopin 
they were of the perfect age (which was the fresh 
marriageable in the case of Solange) to engage our best 
anxiety, let alone their being of a salience of sensibility 
and temper to leave no one of their aspects negligible. 
That their parent should not have found herself con- 
clusively "upset," sickened beyond repair, or other- 
wise morally bankrupt, on her having to recognise in 
her daughter's hideous perversity and depravity, as 
we learn these things to have been, certain inevita- 
bilities of consequence from the social air of the ma- 
ternal circle, is really a monumental fact in respect to 
our great woman's elasticity, her instinct for never 
abdicating by mere discouragement. Here in especial 
we get the broad male note — it being so exactly the 
manly part, and so very questionably the womanly, 
not to have to draw from such imputations of respon- 
sibility too crushing a self-consciousness. Of the 
extent and variety of danger to which the enjoyment 
of a moral tone could be exposed and yet superbly sur- 
vive Madame Karenine's pages give us the measure; 
they offer us in action the very ideal of an exemplary 
triumph of character and mind over one of the very 
highest tides of private embarrassment that it is well 



228 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

possible to conceive. And it is no case of that passive 
acceptance of deplorable matters which has abounded 
in the history of women, even distinguished ones, 
whether to the pathetic or to the merely scandalous 
effect; the acceptance is active, constructive, almost 
exhilarated by the resources of affirmation and argu- 
ment that it has at its command. The whole instance 
is sublime in its sort, thanks to the acuteness of all 
its illustrative sides, the intense interest of which loses 
nothing in the hands of our chronicler; who perhaps, 
however, reaches off into the vast vague of Chopin's 
native affiliations and references with an energy with 
which we find it a little difficult to keep step. 

In speaking as we have done of George Sand's "use" 
of each twist of her road as it came — a use which we 
now recognise as the very thriftiest — we touch on that 
principle of vital health in her which made nothing 
that might by the common measure have been called 
one of the graver dilemmas, that is one of the checks 
to the continuity of life, really matter. What this 
felicity most comes to in fact is that doing at any cost 
the work that lies to one's hand shines out again and 
yet again as the saving secret of the soul. She af- 
firmed her freedom right and left, but her most char- 
acteristic assertion of it throughout was just in the 
luxury of labour. The exhaustive account we at any 
rate now enjoy of the family life surrounding her dur- 
ing the years here treated of and as she had consti- 
tuted it, the picture of all the queer conflicting sensi- 
bilities engaged, and of the endless ramifications and 
reflections provided for these, leaves us nothing to 
learn on that congested air, that obstructive medium 
for the range of the higher tone, which the lady of 



GEORGE SAND 229 

Nohant was so at her "objective" happiest, even if 
at her superficially, that is her nervously, most flurried 
and depressed, in bravely breasting. It is as if the 
conditions there and in Paris during these several years 
had been consistently appointed by fate to throw into 
relief the applications of a huge facility, a sort of 
universal readiness, with a rare intelligence to back it. 
Absolutely nothing was absent, or with all the data 
could have been, that might have bewildered a weaker 
genius into some lapse of eloquence or of industry; 
everything that might have overwhelmed, or at least 
have disconcerted, the worker who could throw off the 
splendid "Lucrezia Floriani" in the thick of battle 
came upon her at once, inspiring her to show that on 
her system of health and cheer, of experiential economy, 
as we may call it, to be disconcerted was to be lost. 
To be lacerated and calumniated was in comparison 
a trifle; with a certain sanity of reaction these things 
became as naught, for the sanity of reaction was but 
the line of consistency, the theory and attitude of 
sincerity kept at the highest point. The artist in 
general, we need scarcely remind ourselves, is in a 
high degree liable to arrive at the sense of what he may 
have seen or felt, or said or suffered, by working it out 
as a subject, casting it into some form prescribed by his 
art; but even here he in general knows limits — unless 
perchance he be loose as Byron was loose, or possess 
such a power of disconnection, such a clear stand-off of 
the intelligence, as accompanied the experiments of 
Goethe. Our own experiments, we commonly feel, are 
comparatively timid, just as we can scarce be said, in 
the homely phrase, to serve our esthetic results of them 
hot and hot; we are too conscious of a restrictive in- 
stinct about the conditions we may, in like familiar 



2 3 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

language let ourselves in for, there being always the 
question of what we should be able "intellectually" to 
show for them. The life of the author of "Lucrezia 
Floriani" at its most active may fairly be described 
as an immunity from restrictive instincts more ably 
cultivated than any we know. Again and yet again 
we note the positive premium so put upon the sur- 
render to sensibility, and how, since the latter was 
certain to spread to its maximum and to be admired 
in proportion to its spread, some surrender was always 
to have been worth while. "Lucrezia Floriani" ought 
to have been rather measurably bad — lucidity, har- 
mony, maturity, definiteness of sense, being so likely 
to fail it in the troubled air in which it was born. 
Yet how can we do less than applaud a composition 
throwing off as it goes such a passage as the splendid 
group of pages cited by Madame Karenine from the 
incident of the heroine's causing herself to be rowed 
over to the island in her Italian lake on that summer 
afternoon when the sense of her situation had become 
sharp for her to anguish, in order to take stock of the 
same without interruption and see, as we should say 
to-day, where she is ? The whole thing has the grand 
manner and the noblest eloquence, reaching out as 
it does on the spot to the lesson and the moral of the 
convulsions that have been prepared in the first in- 
stance with such complacency, and illustrating in per- 
fection the author's faculty for the clear re-emergence 
and the prompt or, as we may call it, the paying re- 
action. The case is put for her here as into its final 
nutshell: you may "live" exactly as you like, that is 
live in perfect security and fertility, when such breadth 
of rendering awaits your simply sitting down to it. Is 
it not true, we say, that without her breadth our won- 



GEORGE SAND 231 

derful woman would have been "nowhere" ? — whereas 
with it she is effectively and indestructibly at any 
point of her field where she may care to pretend to 
stand. 

This biographer, I must of course note, discriminates 
with delicacy among her heroine's felicities and mis- 
takes, recognising that some of the former, as a latent 
awkwardness in them developed, inevitably parted 
with the signs that distinguished them from the latter; 
but I think we feel, as the instances multiply, that no 
regret could have equalled for us that of our not having 
the display vivid and complete. Once all the elements 
of the scarce in advance imaginable were there it 
would have been a pity that they should not offer us 
the show of their full fruition. What more striking 
show, for example, than that, as recorded by Madame 
Karenine in a footnote, the afflicted parent of Solange 
should have lived to reproduce, or rather, as she would 
herself have said, to "arrange" the girlish character 
and conduct of that young person, so humiliating at the 
time to any near relation, let alone a mother, in the 
novel of "Mademoiselle Merquem," where the truth 
to the original facts and the emulation of the grace- 
less prime "effects" are such as our author can vouch 
for ? The fiction we name followed indeed after long 
years, but during the lifetime of the displeasing daugh- 
ter and with an ease of reference to the past that may 
fairly strike us as the last word of superiority to blight- 
ing association. It is quite as if the close and amused 
matching of the character and its play in the novel 
with the wretched old realities, those that had broken 
in their day upon the scared maternal vision, had been 
a work of ingenuity attended with no pang. The 



232 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

example is interesting as a measure of the possible 
victory of time in a case where we might have sup- 
posed the one escape to have been by forgetting. 
Madame Sand remembers to the point of gratefully — 
gratefully as an artist — reconstituting; we in fact feel 
her, as the irrepressible, the "healthy" artist, positively 
to enjoy so doing. Thus it clearly defined itself for 
her in the fulness of time that, humiliating, to use our 
expression, as the dreadful Solange might have been 
and have incessantly remained, she herself had never 
in the least consented to the stupidity or sterility of 
humiliation. So it could be that the free mind and the 
free hand were ever at her service. A beautiful in- 
different agility, a power to cast out that was at least 
proportioned to the power to take in, hangs about all 
this and meets us in twenty connections. Who of her 
readers has forgotten the harmonious dedication — 
her inveterate dedications have always, like her clear 
light prefaces, the last grace — of "Jeanne," so anciently, 
so romantically readable, to her faithful Berrichon 
servant who sits spinning by the fire ? "Vous ne savez 
pas lire, ma paisible amie," but that was not to prevent 
the association of her name with the book, since both 
her own daughter and the author's are in happy pos- 
session of the art and will be able to pass the enter- 
tainment on to her. This in itself is no more than a 
sign of the writer's fine democratic ease, which she 
carried at all times to all lengths, and of her charming 
habit of speech; but it somehow becomes further illus- 
trational, testifying for the manner in which genius, 
if it be but great enough, lives its life at small cost, 
when we learn that after all, by a turn of the hand, 
the "paisible amie" was, under provocation, bundled 
out of the house as if the beautiful relation had not 



GEORGE SAND 233 

meant half of what appeared. Francoise and her 
presence were dispensed with, but the exquisite lines 
remain, which we would not be without for the world. 



Ill 

The various situations determined for the more emi- 
nent of George Sand's intimate associates would always 
be independently interesting, thanks to the intrinsic 
appeal of these characters and even without the light 
reflected withal on the great agent herself; which is 
why poor Chopin's figuration in the events of the year 
1847, as Madame Karenine so fully reconstitutes 
them, is all that is wanted to point their almost night- 
mare quality. Without something of a close view of 
them we fail of a grasp of our heroine's genius — her 
genius for keeping her head in deep seas morally and 
reflectively above water, though but a glance at them 
must suffice us for averting this loss. The old-world 
quality of drama, which throughout so thickens and 
tones the air around her, finds remarkable expression 
in the whole picture of the moment. Every connection 
involved bristles like a conscious consequence, tells for 
all it is worth, as we say, and the sinister complexity 
of reference — for all the golden clearings-up that awaited 
it on the ideal plane — leaves nothing to be desired. 
The great and odd sign of the complications and con- 
vulsions, the alarms and excursions recorded, is that 
these are all the more or less direct fruits of sensibil- 
ity, which had primarily been indulged in, under the 
doom of a preparation of them which no preparation 
of anything else was to emulate, with a good faith 
fairly touching in presence of the eventual ugliness. 
Madame Sand's wonderful mother, commemorated 



234 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

for us in "L'Histoire de ma Vie" with the truth surely 
attaching in a like degree to no mother in all the 
literature of so-called confession, had had for cousin 
a "fille entretenue ,, who had married a mechanic. 
This Adele Brault had had in the course of her adven- 
tures a daughter in whom, as an unfortunate young 
relative, Madame Dupin had taken an interest, intro- 
ducing her to the heiress of Nohant, who viewed her 
with favour — she appears to have been amiable and 
commendable — and eventually associated her with her 
own children. She was thus the third member of that 
illegitimate progeny with which the Nohant scene was 
to have become familiar, George Sand's natural brother 
on her father's side and her natural sister on her 
mother's representing this element from the earlier 
time on. The young Augustine, fugitive from a circle 
still less edifying, was thus made a companion of the son 
and the daughter of the house, and was especially held 
to compare with the latter to her great advantage in 
the matter of character, docility and temper. These 
young persons formed, as it were, with his more dis- 
tinguished friend, the virtual family of Chopin during 
those years of specifically qualified domestication which 
affect us as only less of a mystification to taste than 
that phase of the unrestricted which had immediately 
preceded them. Hence a tangled tissue of relations 
within the circle that became, as it strikes us, inde- 
scribable for difficulty and "delicacy," not to say for 
the perfection of their impracticability, and as to 
which the great point is that Madame Sand's having 
taken them so robustly for granted throws upon her 
temperamental genius a more direct light than any 
other. The whole case belongs doubtless even more 
to the hapless history of Chopin himself than to that 



GEORGE SAND 235 

of his terrible friend — terrible for her power to flourish 
in conditions sooner or later fatal to weaker vessels; 
but is in addition to this one of the most striking il- 
lustrations possible of that view or theory of social life 
handed over to the reactions of sensibility almost alone 
which, while ever so little the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon 
world, has largely governed the manners of its sister 
societies. It has been our view, very emphatically, 
in general, that the sane and active social body — or, 
for that matter, the sane and active individual, ad- 
dressed to the natural business of life — goes wrongly 
about it to encourage sensibility, or to do anything on 
the whole but treat it as of no prime importance; the 
traps it may lay for us, however, being really of the 
fewest in a race to which the very imagination of it 
may be said, I think, to have been comparatively 
denied. The imagination of it sat irremovably, on the 
other hand, and as a matter of course, at the Nohant 
fireside; where indeed we find the play and the 
ravage chiefly interesting through our thus seeing the 
delicate Chopin, whose semi-smothered appeal remains 
peculiarly pathetic, all helpless and foredoomed at the 
centre of the whirl. Nothing again strikes us more 
in the connection than the familiar truth that interest- 
ing persons make everything that concerns them in- 
teresting, or seldom fail to redeem from what might in 
another air seem but meanness and vanity even their 
most compromised states and their greatest wastes of 
value. Every one in the particular Nohant drama 
here exposed loses by the exposure — so far as loss could 
be predicated of amounts which, in general, excepting 
the said sensibility, were so scant among them; every 
one, that is, save the ruling spirit of all, with the ex- 
traordinary mark in her of the practical defiance of 



236 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

waste and of her inevitable enrichment, for our mea- 
sure, as by reflection from the surrounding shrinkage. 
One of the oddest aspects of the scene is also one of 
the wretchedest, but the oddity makes it interesting, 
by the law I just glanced at, in spite of its vulgar side. 
How could it not be interesting, we ask as we read, 
to feel that Chopin, though far from the one man, was 
the one gentleman of the association, the finest set of 
nerves and scruples, and yet to see how little that 
availed him, in exasperated reactions, against mistakes 
of perverted sympathy ? It is relevant in a high degree 
to our view of his great protectress as reducible at her 
best to male terms that she herself in this very light 
fell short, missed the ideal safeguard which for her 
friend had been preinvolved — as of course may be the 
peril, ever, with the creature so transmuted, and as is 
so strikingly exemplified, in the pages before us, when 
Madame Karenine ingenuously gives us chapter and 
verse for her heroine's so unqualified demolition of 
the person of Madame d'Agoult, devotee of Liszt, 
mother to be, by that token, of Richard Wagner's 
second wife, and sometime intimate of the author 
of "Isidora," in which fiction we are shown the parody 
perpetrated. If women rend each other on occasion 
with sharper talons than seem to belong on the whole 
to the male hand, however intendingly applied, we 
find ourselves reflect parenthetically that the loss of 
this advantage may well be a matter for them to con- 
sider when the new approximation is the issue. 

The great sign of the Nohant circle on all this show- 
ing, at any rate, is the intense personalism, as we may 
call it, reigning there, or in other words the vivacity, 
the acuity and irritability of the personal relations — 



GEORGE SAND 237 

which flourished so largely, we at the same time feel, 
by reason of the general gift for expression, that gift 
to which we owe the general superiority of every letter, 
from it scarce matters whom, laid under contribution 
by our author. How could people not feel with acuity 
when they could, when they had to, write with such 
point and such specific intelligence ? — just indeed as 
one asks how letters could fail to remain at such a level 
among them when they incessantly generated choice 
matter for expression. Madame Sand herself is of 
course on this ground easily the most admirable, as 
we have seen; but every one "knows how" to write, 
and does it well in proportion as the matter in hand 
most demands and most rewards proper saying. Much 
of all this stuff of history seems indeed to have been 
susceptible of any amount of force of statement; yet 
we note all the while how in the case of the great 
mistress of the pen at least some shade of intrinsic 
beauty attends even the presentation of quite abomi- 
nable facts. We can only see it as abominable, at least, 
so long as we have Madame Sand's words — which are 
somehow a different thing from her word — for it, that 
Chopin had from the first "sided" with the atrocious 
Solange in that play of her genius which is character- 
ised by our chronicler as wickedness for the sake of 
wickedness, as art for the sake of art, without other 
logic or other cause. "Once married," says Madame 
Karenine, "she made a double use of this wickedness. 
She had always hated Augustine; she wished, one 
doesn't know why, to break off her marriage, and by 
calumnies and insinuations she succeeded. Then 
angry with her mother she avenged herself on her as 
well by further calumnies. Thereupon took place at 
Nohant such events that" — that in fine we stop before 



238 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

them with this preliminary shudder. The cross- 
currents of violence among them would take more 
keeping apart than we have time for, the more that 
everything comes back, for interest, to the intrinsic 
weight of the tone of the principal sufferer from them — 
as we see her, as we wouldn't for the world not see her, 
in spite of the fact that Chopin was to succumb scarce 
more than a year later to multiplied lacerations, and 
that she was to override and reproduce and pre-ap- 
pointedly flourish for long years after. If it is inter- 
esting, as I have pronounced it, that Chopin, again, 
should have consented to be of the opinion of Solange 
that the relations between her brother Maurice and 
the hapless Augustine were of the last impropriety, I 
fear I can account no better for this than by our sense 
that the more the genius loci has to feed her full tone 
the more our faith in it, as such a fine thing in itself, 
is justified. Almost immediately after the precipi- 
tated marriage of the daughter of the house has taken 
place, the Clesinger couple, avid and insolent, of a 
breadth of old time impudence in fact of which our 
paler day has lost the pattern, are back on the mother's 
hands, to the effect of a vividest picture of Maurice 
well-nigh in a death-grapple with his apparently quite 
monstrous " bounder'' of a brother-in-law, a picture 
that further gives us Madame Sand herself smiting 
Clesinger in the face and receiving from him a blow 
in the breast, while Solange "coldly," with an iciness 
indeed peculiarly her own, fans the rage and approves 
her husband's assault, and while the divine composer, 
though for that moment much in the background, ap- 
proves the wondrous approval. He still approves, to 
all appearance, the daughter's interpretation of the 
mother's wish to "get rid" of him as the result of an 



GEORGE SAND 239 

amorous design on the latter's part in respect of a 
young man lately introduced to the circle as Maurice's 
friend and for the intimate relation with whom it is 
thus desirable that the coast shall be made clear. 
How else than through no fewer consistencies of the 
unedifying on the part of these provokers of the ex- 
pressional reaction should we have come by innumer- 
able fine epistolary passages, passages constituting in 
themselves verily such adornments of the tale, such 
notes in the scale of all the damaged dignity redressed, 
that we should be morally the poorer without them ? 
One of the vividest glimpses indeed is not in a letter 
but in a few lines from "L'Histoire de ma Vie," the 
composition of which was begun toward the end of 
this period and while its shadow still hung about — 
early in life for a projected autobiography, inasmuch 
as the author had not then reached her forty-fifth 
year. Chopin at work, improvising and composing, 
was apt to become a prey to doubts and depressions, 
so that there were times when to break in upon these 
was to render him a service. 

But it was not always possible to induce him to leave the piano, 
often so much more his torment than his joy, and he began grad- 
ually to resent my proposing he should do so. I never ventured 
on these occasions to insist. Chopin in displeasure was appalling, 
and as with me he always controlled himself it was as if he might 
die of suffocation. 

It is a vision of the possibilities of vibration in such 
organisms that does in fact appal, and with the clash 
of vibrations, those both of genius and of the general 
less sanctioned sensibility, the air must have more than 
sufficiently resounded. Some eight years after the be- 
ginning of their friendship and the year after the final 



2 4 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

complete break in it she writes to Madame Pauline 
Viardot: 

Do you see Chopin ? Tell me about his health. I have been 
unable to repay his fury and his hatred by hatred and fury. I 
think of him as of a sick, embittered, bewildered child. I saw 
much of Solange in Paris, the letter goes on, and made her my con- 
stant occupation, but without finding anything but a stone in the 
place of her heart. I have taken up my work again while waiting 
for the tide to carry me elsewhere. 

All the author's "authority" is in these few words, 
and in none more than in the glance at the work and 
the tide. The work and the tide rose ever as high as 
she would to float her, and wherever we look there is 
always the authority. "I find Chopin magnificent" 
she had already written from the thick of the fray, "to 
keep seeing, frequenting and approving Clesinger, who 
struck me because I snatched from his hands the 
hammer he had raised upon Maurice — Chopin whom 
every one talks of as my most faithful and devoted 
friend. " Well indeed may our biographer have put it 
that from a certain date in May 1847 "the two Leit- 
motive which might have been called in the terms of 
Wagner the Leitmotif of soreness and the Leitmotif of 
despair — Chopin, Solange — sound together now in 
fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, 
in all Madame Sand's unpublished letters and in the 
few (of the moment) that have been published. A 
little later a third joins in — Augustine Brault, a motive 
narrowly and tragically linked to the basso obligato of 
Solange." To meet such a passage as the following 
under our heroine's hand again is to feel the whole 
temper of intercourse implied slip straight out of our 
analytic grasp. The allusion is to Chopin and to the 
"defection" of which he had been guilty, to her view, 



GEORGE SAND 241 

at the time when it had been most important that 
she might count on him. What we have first, as out- 
siders, to swallow down, as it were, is the state of 
things, the hysteric pitch of family life, in which any 
ideal of reticence, any principle, as we know it, of 
minding one's business, for mere dignity's sake if for 
none other, had undergone such collapse. 

I grant you I am not sorry that he has withdrawn from me the 
government of his life, for which both he and his friends wanted 
to make me responsible in so much too absolute a fashion. His 
temper kept growing in asperity, so that it had come to his con- 
stantly blowing me up, from spite, ill-humour and jealousy, in 
presence of my friends and my children. Solange made use of it 
with the astuteness that belongs to her, while Maurice began to 
give way to indignation. Knowing and seeing la chastete de nos 
rapports, he saw also that the poor sick soul took up, without 
wanting to and perhaps without being able to help it, the attitude 
of the lover, the husband, the proprietor of my thoughts and actions. 
He was on the point of breaking out and telling him to his face 
that he was making me play, at forty-three years of age, a ridiculous 
part, and that it was an abuse of my kindness, my patience, and my 
pity for his nervous morbid state. A few months more, a few days 
perhaps, of this situation, and an impossible frightful struggle 
would have broken out between them. Foreseeing the storm, I 
took advantage of Chopin's predilection for Solange and left him 
to sulk, without an effort to bring him round. We have not for 
three months exchanged a word in writing, and I don't know how 
such a cooling-off will end. 

She develops the picture of the extravagance of his 
sick irritability; she accepts with indifference the cer- 
tainty that his friends will accuse her of having cast 
him out to take a lover; the one thing she "minds" is 
the force of evil in her daughter, who is the centre of 
all the treachery. "She will come back to me when 
she needs me, that I know. But her return will be 
neither tender nor consoling." Therefore it is when at 



242 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

the beginning of the winter of this same dreadful year 
she throws off the free rich summary of what she has 
been through in the letter to M. Charles Poncy already 
published in her Correspondence we are swept into 
the current of sympathy and admiration. The pre- 
ceding months had been the heaviest and most pain- 
ful of her life. 

I all but broke down under them utterly, though I had for long 
seen them coming. But you know how one is not always overhung 
by the evil portent, however clear one may read it — there are days, 
weeks, even whole months, when one lives on illusion and fondly 
hopes to divert the blow that threatens. It is always at last the 
most probable ill that surprises us unarmed and unprepared. To 
this explosion of unhappy underground germs joined themselves 
sundry contributive matters, bitter things too and quite unex- 
pected; so that I am broken by grief in body and soul. I believe 
my grief incurable, for I never succeed in throwing it off for a few 
hours without its coming upon me again during the next in greater 
force and gloom. I nevertheless struggle against it without res- 
pite, and if I don't hope for a victory which would have to con- 
sist of not feeling at all, at least I have reached that of still bearing 
with life, of even scarcely feeling ill, of having recovered my taste 
for work and of not showing my distress. I have got back outside 
calm and cheer, which are so necessary for others, and everything 
in my life seems to go on well. 






We had already become aware, through commemora- 
tions previous to the present, of that first or innermost 
line of defence residing in George Sand's splendid 
mastery of the letter, the gift that was always so to 
assure her, on every issue, the enjoyment of the first 
chance with posterity. The mere cerebral and manual 
activity represented by the quantity no less than the 
quality of her outflow through the post at a season 
when her engagements were most pressing and her 
anxieties of every sort most cruel is justly qualified by 



GEORGE SAND 243 

Madame Karenine as astounding; the new letters here 
given to the world heaping up the exhibition and testi- 
fying even beyond the finest of those gathered in after 
the writer's death — the mutilations, suppressions and 
other freedoms then used, for that matter, being now 
exposed. If no plot of her most bustling fiction ever 
thickened at the rate at which those agitations of her 
inner circle at which we have glanced multiplied upon 
her hands through the later 'forties, so we are tempted 
to find her rather less in possession of her great moyens 
when handling the artificial presentation than when 
handling what we may call the natural. It is not too 
much to say that the long letter addressed to the cyn- 
ical Solange in April '52, and which these pages give 
us in extenso, would have made the fortune of any 
mere interesting "story" in which one of the char- 
acters might have been presented as writing it. It is 
a document of the highest psychological value and a 
practical summary of all the elements of the writer's 
genius, of all her indefeasible advantages; it is verily 
the gem of her biographer's collection. Taken in con- 
nection with a copious communication to her son, of 
the previous year, on the subject of his sister's char- 
acter and vices, and of their common experience of 
these, it offers, in its ease of movement, its extraor- 
dinary frankness and lucidity, its splendid apprehen- 
sion and interpretation of realities, its state, as it were, 
of saturation with these, exactly the kind of interest 
for which her novels were held remarkable, but in a 
degree even above their maximum. Such a letter is 
an effusion of the highest price; none of a weight so 
baffling to estimation was probably ever inspired in a 
mother by solicitude for a clever daughter's possibil- 
ities. Never surely had an accomplished daughter 



244 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

laid under such contribution a mother of high culture; 
never had such remarkable and pertinent things had 
to flow from such a source; never in fine was so urgent 
an occasion so admirably, so inimitably risen to. 
Marvellous through it all is the way in which, while a 
common recognition of the "facts of life," as between 
two perfectly intelligent men of the world, gives the 
whole diapason, the abdication of moral authority 
and of the rights of wisdom never takes place. The 
tone is a high implication of the moral advantages that 
Solange had inveterately enjoyed and had decided 
none the less to avail herself of so little; which advan- 
tages we absolutely believe in as we read — there is the 
prodigious part: such an education of the soul, and in 
fact of every faculty, such a claim for the irreproach- 
able, it would fairly seem, do we feel any association 
with the great fluent artist, in whatever conditions 
taking place, inevitably, necessarily to have been. 
If we put ourselves questions we yet wave away 
doubts, and with whatever remnants of prejudice the 
writer's last word may often have to clash, our own is 
that there is nothing for grand final Tightness like a 
sufficiently general humanity — when a particularly 
beautiful voice happens to serve it. 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 

1902 

The great feast-days of all, for the restless critic, are 
those much interspaced occasions of his really meeting 
a "case," as he soon enough learns to call, for his 
convenience and assistance, any supremely contribu- 
tive or determinant party to the critical question. 
These are recognitions that make up for many dull 
hours and dry contacts, many a thankless, a discon- 
certed gaze into faces that have proved expressionless. 
Always looking, always hoping for his happiest chance, 
the inquirer into the reasons of things — by which I 
mean especially into the reasons of books — so often 
misses it, so often wastes his steps and withdraws his 
confidence, that he inevitably works out for himself, 
sooner or later, some handy principle of recognition. 
It may be a rough thing, a mere home-made tool of 
his trade, but it serves his purpose if it keeps him from 
beginning with mistakes. He becomes able to note in 
its light the signs and marks of the possible precious 
identity, able to weigh with some exactitude the ap- 
pearances that make for its reality. He ends, through 
much expenditure of patience, by seeing when, how, 
why, the "case" announces and presents itself, and he 
perhaps even feels that failure and felicity have worked 
together to produce in him a sense for it that may at 
last be trusted as an instinct. He thus arrives at a 
view of all the candidates, frequently interesting 

24s 



246 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

enough, who fall short of the effective title, because he 
has at need, perhaps even from afar, scented along the 
wind the strongest member of the herd. He may per- 
haps not always be able to give us the grounds of his 
certainty, but he is at least never without knowing it 
in presence of one of the full-blown products that 
are the joy of the analyst. He recognises as well 
how the state of being full-blown comes above all 
from the achievement of consistency, of that last con- 
sistency which springs from the unrestricted enjoyment 
of freedom. 

Many of us will doubtless not have forgotten how 
we were witnesses a certain number of years since to a 
season and a society that had found themselves of a 
sudden roused, as from some deep drugged sleep, to 
the conception of the "esthetic" law of life; in conse- 
quence of which this happy thought had begun to re- 
ceive the honours of a lively appetite and an eager 
curiosity, but was at the same time surrounded and 
manipulated by as many different kinds of inexpertness 
as probably ever huddled together on a single pretext. 
The spectacle was strange and finally was wearisome, 
for the simple reason that the principle in question, 
once it was proclaimed — a principle not easily for- 
mulated, but which we may conveniently speak of 
as that of beauty at any price, beauty appealing alike 
to the senses and to the mind — was never felt to fall 
into its place as really adopted and efficient. It re- 
mained for us a queer high-flavoured fruit from over- 
seas, grown under another sun than ours, passed round 
and solemnly partaken of at banquets organised to try 
it, but not found on the whole really to agree with us, 
not proving thoroughly digestible. It brought with it 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 247 

no repose, brought with it only agitation. We were 
not really, not fully convinced, for the state of convic- 
tion is quiet. This was to have been the state itself 
— that is the state of mind achieved and established — 
in which we were to know ugliness no more, to make 
the esthetic consciousness feel at home with us, or 
learn ourselves at any rate to feel at home with it. 
That would have been the reign of peace, the supreme 
beatitude; but stability continued to elude us. We 
had mustered a hundred good reasons for it, yet the 
reasons but lighted up our desert. They failed to 
flower into a single concrete esthetic "type." One 
authentic, one masterful specimen would have done 
wonders for us, would at least have assuaged our curios- 
ity. But we were to be left till lately with our curios- 
ity on our hands. 

This is a yearning, however, that Signor D'Annunzio 
may at last strike us as supremely formed to gratify; 
so promptly we find in him as a literary figure the high- 
est expression of the reality that our own conditions 
were to fail of making possible. He has immediately 
the value of giving us by his mere logical unfolding 
the measure of our shortcomings in the same direction, 
that of our timidities and penuries and failures. He 
throws a straighter and more inevitable light on the 
esthetic consciousness than has, to my sense, in our 
time, reached it from any other quarter; and there is 
many a mystery that properly interrogated he may 
help to clear up for us, many an explanation of our 
misadventure that — as I have glanced at it — he may 
give. He starts with the immense advantage of enjoy- 
ing the invoked boon by grace and not by effort, of 
claiming it under another title than the sweat of his 



248 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

brow and the aspiration of his culture. He testifies 
to the influence of things that have had time to get 
themselves taken for granted. Beauty at any price is 
an old story to him; art and form and style as the aim 
of the superior life are a matter of course; and it may 
be said of him, I think, that, thanks to these trans- 
mitted and implanted instincts and aptitudes, his in- 
dividual development begins where the struggle of the 
mere earnest questioner ends. Signor D'Annunzio is 
earnest in his way, quite extraordinarily — which is a 
feature of his physiognomy that we shall presently 
come to and about which there will be something to 
say; but we feel him all the while in such secure pos- 
session of his heritage of favouring circumstance that 
his sense of intellectual responsibility is almost out of 
proportion. This is one of his interesting special marks, 
the manner in which the play of the esthetic instinct 
in him takes on, for positive extravagance and as a 
last refinement of freedom, the crown of solicitude and 
anxiety. Such things but make with him for ornament 
and parade; they are his tribute to civility; the essence 
of the matter is meanwhile in his blood and his bones. 
No mistake was possible from the first as to his being 
of the inner literary camp — a new form altogether of 
perceptive and expressive energy; the question was 
settled by the intensity and variety, to say nothing of 
the precocity, of his early poetic production. 

Born at Pescara, in the Regno, the old kingdom of 
Naples, "toward" 1863, as I find noted by a cautious 
biographer, he had while scarce out of his teens allowed 
his lyric genius full opportunity of scandalising even 
the moderately austere. He defined himself betimes 
very much as he was to remain, a rare imagination, a 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 249 

poetic, an artistic intelligence of extraordinary range 
and fineness concentrated almost wholly on the life of 
the senses. For the critic who simplifies a little to 
state clearly, the only ideas he urges upon us are the 
erotic and the plastic, which have for him about an 
equal intensity, or of which it would be doubtless more 
correct to say that he makes them interchangeable 
faces of the same figure. He began his career by 
playing with them together in verse, to innumerable 
light tunes and with an extraordinary general effect of 
curiosity and brilliancy. He has continued still more 
strikingly to play with them in prose; they have re- 
mained the substance of his intellectual furniture. 
It is of his prose only, however, that, leaving aside the 
Intermezzo, LTsotteo, La Chimera, Odi Navali and 
other such matters, I propose to speak, the subject 
being of itself ample for one occasion. His five novels 
and his four plays have extended his fame; they sug- 
gest by themselves as many observations as we shall 
have space for. The group of productions, as the 
literary industry proceeds among us to-day, is not 
large, but we may doubt if a talent and a temperament, 
if indeed a whole "view of life," ever built themselves 
up as vividly for the reader out of so few blocks. The 
writer is even yet enviably young; but this solidity of 
his literary image, as of something already seated on 
time and accumulation, makes him a rare example. 
Precocity is somehow an inadequate name for it, as 
precocity seldom gets away from the element of 
promise, and it is not exactly promise that blooms in 
the hard maturity of such a performance as "The 
Triumph of Death." There are certain expressions of 
experience, of the experience of the whole man, that 
are like final milestones, milestones for his possible 



250 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

fertility if not for his possible dexterity; a truth that 
has not indeed prevented "II Fuoco," with its doubtless 
still ampler finality, from following the work just men- 
tioned. And we have had particularly before us, in 
verse, I must add, "Francesca da Rimini/' with the 
great impression a great actress has enabled this drama 
to make. 

Only I must immediately in this connection also add 
that Signor D'Annunzio's plays are, beside his novels, 
of decidedly minor weight; testifying abundantly to 
his style, his romantic sense and his command of images, 
but standing in spite of their eloquence only for half 
of his talent, largely as he yet appears in "II Fuoco" to 
announce himself by implication as an intending, in- 
deed as a pre-eminent dramatist. The example is 
interesting when we catch in the fact the opportunity 
for comparing with the last closeness the capacity of 
the two rival canvases, as they become for the occasion, 
on which the picture of life may be painted. The 
closeness is never so great, the comparison never so 
pertinent, as when the separate efforts are but different 
phases of the same talent. It is not at any rate under 
this juxtaposition that the infinitely greater amplitude 
of portrayal resident in the novel strikes us least. It 
in fact strikes us the more, in this quarter, for Signor 
D'Annunzio, that his plays have been with one excep- 
tion successes. We must none the less take "Fran- 
cesca" but for a success of curiosity; on the part of 
the author I mean even more than on the part of the 
public. It is primarily a pictorial and ingenious thing 
and, as a picture of passion, takes, in the total col- 
lection, despite its felicities of surface and arrangement, 
distinctly a "back seat." Scarcely less than its com- 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 251 

panions it overflows with the writer's plenitude of 
verbal expression, thanks to which, largely, the series 
will always prompt a curiosity and even a tenderness 
in any reader interested precisely in this momentous 
question of "style in a play" — interested in particular 
to learn by what esthetic chemistry a play would as a 
work of art propose to eschew it. It is in any such 
connection so inexpugnable that we have only to be 
cheated of it in one place to feel the subject cry aloud 
for it, like a sick man forsaken, in another. 

I may mention at all events the slightly perverse fact 
that, thanks, on this side, to the highest watermark of 
translation, Signor D'Annunzio makes his best appeal 
to the English public as a dramatist. Of each of the 
three English versions of other examples of his work 
whose titles are inscribed at the beginning of these 
remarks it may be said that they are adequate and 
respectable considering the great difficulty encountered. 
The author's highest good fortune has nevertheless 
been at the hands of his French interpreter, who has 
managed to keep constantly close to him — allowing 
for an occasional inconsequent failure of courage when 
the directness of the original brave Vhonnetete — and 
yet to achieve a tone not less idiomatic, and above all 
not less marked by "authority," than his own. Mr. 
Arthur Symons, among ourselves, however, has ren- 
dered the somewhat insistent eloquence of "La Gio- 
conda" and the intricate and difficult verse of "Fran- 
cesca" with all due sympathy, and in the latter case 
especially — a highly arduous task — with remarkably 
patient skill. It is not his fault, doubtless, if the feet 
of his English text strike us as moving with less free- 
dom than those of his original; such being the hard 



252 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

price paid always by the translator who tries for cor- 
respondence from step to step, tries for an identical 
order. Even less is he responsible for its coming still 
more home to us in a translation that the meagre anec- 
dote here furnishing the subject, and on which the 
large superstructure rests, does not really lend itself 
to those developments that make a full or an interest- 
ing tragic complexity. Behind the glamour of its im- 
mense literary association the subject of "Francesca" 
is for purposes of essential, of enlarged exhibition de- 
lusive and "short." 

These, however, are for the moment side-issues; 
what is more relevant is the stride taken by our author's 
early progress in his first novel and his second, "II 
Piacere" and "LTnnocente"; a pair from the fresh- 
ness, the direct young energy of which he was, for some 
of his admirers, too promptly and to markedly to de- 
cline. We may take it as characteristic of the intensity 
of the literary life in him that his brief career falls 
already thus into periods and supplies a quantity of 
history sufficient for those differences among students 
by which the dignity of history appears mainly to be 
preserved. The nature of his prime inspiration I have 
already glanced at; and we are helped to a character- 
isation if I say that the famous enthroned "beauty" 
which operates here, so straight, as the great obses- 
sion, is not in any perceptible degree moral beauty. It 
would be difficult perhaps to find elsewhere in the 
same compass so much expression of the personal life 
resting so little on any picture of the personal char- 
acter and the personal will. It is not that Signor 
D'Annunzio has not more than once pushed his fur- 
row in this latter direction; but nothing is exactly more 



GABR1ELE D'ANNUNZIO 253 

interesting, as we shall see, than the seemingly inevi- 
table way in which the attempt falls short. 

"II Piacere," the first in date of the five tales, has, 
though with imperfections, the merit of giving us 
strongly at the outset the author's scale and range of 
view, and of so constituting a sort of prophetic summary 
of his elements. All that is done in the later things 
is more or less done here, and nothing is absent here 
that we are not afterwards also to miss. I propose, 
however, that it shall not be prematurely a question 
with us of what we miss; no intelligible statement of 
which, for that matter, in such considerations as these, 
is ever possible till there has been some adequate 
statement of what we find. Count Andrea Sperelli is 
a young man who pays, pays heavily, as we take it 
that we are to understand, for an unbridled surrender 
to the life of the senses; whereby it is primarily a pic- 
ture of that life that the story gives us. He is repre- 
sented as inordinately, as quite monstrously, endowed 
for the career that from the first absorbs and that 
finally is to be held, we suppose, to engulf him; and it 
is a tribute to the truth with which his endowment is 
presented that we should scarce know where else to 
look for so complete and convincing an account of 
such adventures. Casanova de Seingalt is of course 
infinitely more copious, but his autobiography is cheap 
loose journalism compared with the directed, finely- 
condensed iridescent epic of Count Andrea. 

This young man's years have run but half their 
course from twenty to thirty when he meets and be- 
comes entangled with a woman more infernally expert 
even than himself in the matters in which he is most 



254 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

expert — and he is given us as a miracle of social and in- 
tellectual accomplishment — the effect of whom is 
fatally to pervert and poison his imagination. As his 
imagination is applied exclusively to the employments 
of "love," this means, for him, a frustration of all 
happiness, all comfortable consistency, in subsequent 
relations of the same order. The author's view — this 
is fundamental — is all of a world in which relations of 
any other order whatever mainly fail to offer them- 
selves in any attractive form. Andrea Sperelli, loving, 
accordingly — in the manner in which D'Annunzio's 
young men love and to which we must specifically re- 
turn — a woman of good faith, a woman as different as 
possible from the creature of evil communications, finds 
the vessel of his spirit itself so infected and disqualified 
that it falsifies and dries up everything that passes 
through it. The idea that has virtually determined 
the situation appears in fact to be that the hero would 
have loved in another manner, or would at least have 
wished to, but that he had too promptly put any such 
fortune, so far as his capacity is concerned, out of court. 
We have our reasons, presently manifest, for doubting 
the possibility itself; but the theory has nevertheless 
given its direction to the fable. 

For the rest the author's three sharpest signs are 
already unmistakable: first his rare notation of states 
of excited sensibility; second his splendid visual sense, 
the quick generosity of his response to the message, 
as we nowadays say, of aspects and appearances, to 
the beauty of places and things; third his ample and 
exquisite style, his curious, various, inquisitive, always 
active employment of language as a means of com- 
munication and representation. So close is the marriage 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 255 

between his power of "rendering," in the light of the 
imagination, and whatever he sees and feels, that we 
should much mislead in speaking of his manner as a 
thing distinct from the matter submitted to it. The 
fusion is complete and admirable, so that, though his 
work is nothing if not "literary," we see at no point of 
it where literature or where life begins or ends: we 
swallow our successive morsels with as little question 
as we swallow food that has by proper preparation 
been reduced to singleness of savour. It is brought 
home to us afresh that there is no complete creation 
without style any more than there is complete music 
without sound; also that when language becomes as 
closely applied and impressed a thing as for the most 
part in the volumes before us the fact of artistic crea- 
tion is registered at a stroke. It is never more present 
than in the thick-sown illustrative images and figures 
that fairly bloom under D'Annunzio's hand. I find 
examples in "II Piacere," as elsewhere, by simply 
turning the pages. "His will" — of the hero's weakness 
— "useless as a sword of base temper hung at the side 
of a drunkard or a dullard." Or of his own southern 
land in September: "I scarce know why, looking at the 
country in this season, I always think of some beauti- 
ful woman after childbirth, who lies back in her 
white bed, smiling with a pale astonished inextinguish- 
able smile." Or the incision of this: "Where for him 
now were those unclean short-lived loves that left in 
the mouth the strange acidity of fruit cut with a steel 
knife ?" Or the felicity of the following, of a southern 
night seen and felt from the terrace of a villa. "Clear 
meteors at intervals streaked the motionless air, 
running over it as lightly and silently as drops of water 
on a crystal pane." "The sails on the sea," he says of 



256 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

the same look-out by day, "were as pious and number- 
less as the wings of cherubim on the gold grounds of old 
Giottesque panels." 

But it is above all here for two things that his faculty 
is admirable; one of them his making us feel through 
the windows of his situation, or the gaps, as it were, of 
his flowering wood, the golden presence of Rome, the 
charm that appeals to him as if he were one of the pil- 
grims from afar, save that he reproduces it with an 
authority in which, as we have seen, the pilgrims from 
afar have mainly been deficient. The other is the 
whole category of the phenomena of "passion," as 
passion prevails between his men and his women — and 
scarcely anything else prevails; the states of feeling, of 
ecstasy and suffering engendered, the play of sensibil- 
ity from end to end of the scale. In this direction he 
has left no dropped stitches for any worker of like 
tapestries to pick up. We shall here have made out 
that many of his "values" are much to be contested, 
but that where they are true they are as fresh as dis- 
coveries; witness the passage where Sperelli, driving 
back to Rome after a steeplechase in which he has been 
at the supreme moment worsted, meets nothing that 
does not play with significance into his vision and act 
with force on his nerves. He has before the race had 
"words," almost blows, on the subject of one of the 
ladies present, with one of the other riders, of which 
the result is that they are to send each other their 
seconds; but the omens are not for his adversary, in 
spite of the latter's success on the course. 

From the mail-coach, on the return, he overtook the flight 
toward Rome of Giannetto Rutolo, seated in a small two-wheeled 
trap, behind the quick trot of a great roan, over whom he bent 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 257 

with tight reins, holding his head down and his cigar in his teeth, 
heedless of the attempts of policemen to keep him in line. Rome, 
in the distance, stood up dark against a zone of light as yellow as 
sulphur; and the statues crowning St. John Lateran looked huge, 
above the zone, in their violet sky. Then it was that Andrea fully 
knew the pain he was making another soul suffer. 

Nothing could be more characteristic of the writer 
than the way what has preceded flowers into that last 
reality; and equally in his best manner, doubtless, is 
such a passage as the following from the same volume, 
which treats of the hero's first visit to the sinister great 
lady whose influence on his soul and his senses is to 
become as the trail of a serpent. She receives him, 
after their first accidental meeting, with extraordinary 
promptitude and the last intimacy, receives him in the 
depths of a great Roman palace which the author, 
with a failure of taste that is, unfortunately for him, 
on ground of this sort, systematic, makes a point of 
naming. "Then they ceased to speak. Each felt the 
presence of the other flow and mingle with his own, 
with her own, very blood; till it was her blood at last 
that seemed to have become his life, and his that seemed 
to have become hers. The room grew larger in the 
deep silence; the crucifix of Guido Reni made the 
shade of the canopy and curtains religious; the rumour 
of the city came to them like the murmur of some far- 
away flood." Or take for an instance of the writer's 
way of showing the consciousness as a full, mixed cup, 
of touching us ourselves with the mystery at work 
in his characters, the description of the young man's 
leaving the princely apartments in question after the 
initiation vouchsafed to him. He has found the great 
lady ill in bed, with remedies and medicine-bottles at 
her side, but not too ill, as we have seen, to make him 



258 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

welcome. "Farewell," she has said. "Love me! 
Remember!" 

It seemed to him, crossing the threshold again, that he heard 
behind him a burst of sobs. But he went on, a little uncertain, 
wavering like a man who sees imperfectly. The odour of the 
chloroform clung to his sense like some fume of intoxication; but 
at each step something intimate passed away from him, wasting 
itself in the air, so that, impulsively, instinctively, he would have 
kept himself as he was, have closed himself in, have wrapped him- 
self up to prevent the dispersion. The rooms in front of him were 
deserted and dumb. At one of the doors " Mademoiselle" appeared, 
with no sound of steps, with no rustle of skirts, standing there like 
a ghost. "This way, signor conte. You won't find it." She had 
an ambiguous, irritating smile, and her curiosity made her grey 
eyes more piercing. Andrea said nothing. The woman's pres- 
ence again disconcerted and troubled him, affected him with a 
vague repugnance, stirred indeed his wrath. 

Even the best things suffer by detachment from 
their context; but so it is that we are in possession of 
the young man's exit, so it is that the act interests us. 
Fully announced from the first, among these things, 
was D'Annunzio's signal gift of never approaching the 
thing particularly to be done, the thing that so presents 
itself to the painter, without consummately doing it. 
Each of his volumes offers thus its little gallery of 
episodes that stand out like the larger pearls occurring 
at intervals on a string of beads. The steeplechase in 
"II Piacere," the auction sale of precious trinkets in 
Via Sistina on the wet afternoon, the morning in the 
garden at Schifanoia, by the southern sea, when Donna 
Maria, the new revelation, first comes down to Andrea, 
who awaits her there in the languor of convalescence 
from the almost fatal wound received in the duel of 
which the altercation on the race-course has been the 
issue: the manner of such things as these has an ex- 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 259 

traordinary completeness of beauty. But they are, like 
similar pages in "II Trionfo" and "II Fuoco," not 
things for adequate citation, not things that lend 
themselves as some of the briefer felicities. Donna 
Maria, on the September night at Schifanoia, has been 
playing for Andrea and their hostess certain old quaint 
gavottes and toccatas. 

It lived again wondrously beneath her fingers, the eighteenth- 
century music, so melancholy in its dance-tunes — tunes that might 
have been composed to be danced, on languid afternoons of some 
St. Martin's summer, in a deserted park, among hushed fountains 
and pedestals without their statues, over carpets of dead roses, by 
pairs of lovers soon to love no more. 

Autobiographic in form, "LTnnocente" sticks closely 
to its theme, and though the form is on the whole a 
disadvantage to it the texture is admirably close. The 
question is of nothing less than a young husband's re- 
lation to the illegitimate child of his wife, born con- 
fessedly as such, and so born, marvellous to say, in 
spite of the circumstance that the wife adores him, and 
of the fact that, though long grossly, brutally false to 
her, he also adores his wife. To state these data is 
sufficiently to express the demand truly made by them 
for superiority of treatment; they require certainly two 
or three almost impossible postulates. But we of 
course never play the fair critical game with an author, 
never get into relation with him at all, unless we grant 
him his postulates. His subject is what is given him — 
given him by influences, by a process, with which we 
have nothing to do; since what art, what revelation, 
can ever really make such a mystery, such a passage 
in the private life of the intellect, adequately traceable 
for us ? His treatment of it, on the other hand, is 



2 6o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

what he actively gives; and it is with what he gives 
that we are critically concerned. If there is nothing 
in him that effectually induces us to make the postulate, 
he is then empty for us altogether, and the sooner we 
have done with him the better; little as the truly curious 
critic enjoys, as a general thing, having publicly to 
throw up the sponge. 

Tullio Hermil, who finally compasses the death of 
the little "innocent,'' the small intruder whose pres- 
ence in the family life has become too intolerable, re- 
traces with a master's hand each step of the process 
by which he has arrived at this sole issue. Save that 
his wife dumbly divines and accepts it his perpetration 
of the deed is not suspected, and we take the secret 
confession of which the book consists as made for the 
relief and justification of his conscience. The action 
all goes forward in that sphere of exasperated sensi- 
bility which Signor D'Annunzio has made his own so 
triumphantly that other story-tellers strike us in com- 
parison as remaining at the door of the inner precinct, 
as listening there but to catch an occasional faint sound, 
while he alone is well within and moving through the 
place as its master. The sensibility has again in itself 
to be qualified; the exasperation of feeling is ever the 
essence of the intercourse of some man with some 
woman who has reduced him, as in "LTnnocente" 
and in "II Trionfo," to homicidal madness, or of some 
woman with some man who, as in "II Fuoco," and 
also again by a strange duplication of its office in 
"LTnnocente," causes her atrociously to suffer. The 
plane of the situation is thus visibly a singularly special 
plane; that, always, of the more or less insanely de- 
moralised pair of lovers, for neither of whom is any 






GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 261 

other personal relation indicated either as actual or 
as conceivably possible. Here, it may be said on such 
a showing, is material rather alarmingly cut down as 
to range, as to interest and, not least, as to charm; 
but here precisely it is that, by a wonderful chance, 
the author's magic comes effectively into play. 

Little in fact as the relation of the erotically exas- 
perated with the erotically exasperated, when pushed 
on either side to frenzy, would appear to lend itself to 
luminous developments, the difficulty is surmounted 
each time in a fashion that, for consistency no less than 
for brilliancy, is all the author's own. Though sur- 
mounted triumphantly as to interest, that is, the trick 
is played without the least falsification of the luckless 
subjects of his study. They remain the abject vic- 
tims of sensibility that his plan has originally made 
them; they remain exasperated, erotic, hysterical, 
either homicidally or suicidally determined, cut off 
from any personal source of life that does not poison 
them; notwithstanding all of which they neither starve 
dramatically nor suffer us to starve with them. How 
then is this seemingly inevitable catastrophe pre- 
vented ? We ask it but to find on reflection that the 
answer opens the door to their historian's whole secret. 
The unfortunates are deprived of any enlarging or 
saving personal relation, that is of any beneficent 
reciprocity; but they make up for it by their relation 
both to the idea in general and to the whole world of 
the senses, which is the completest that the author 
can conceive for them. He may be described as thus 
executing on their behalf an artistic volte-face of the 
most effective kind, with results wonderful to note. 
The world of the senses, with which he surrounds them 



262 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

— a world too of the idea, that is of a few ideas ad- 
mirably expressed — yields them such a crop of impres- 
sions that the need of other occasions to vibrate and 
respond, to act or to aspire, is superseded by their 
immense factitious agitation. This agitation runs its 
course in strangely brief periods — a singular note, the 
brevity, of every situation; but the period is while it 
lasts, for all its human and social poverty, quite in- 
ordinately peopled and furnished. The innumerable 
different ways in which his concentrated couples are 
able to feel about each other and about their enclosing 
cage of golden wire, the nature and the art of Italy — 
these things crowd into the picture and pervade it, 
lighting it scarcely less, strange to say, because they 
are things of bitterness and woe. 

It is one of the miracles of the imagination; the 
great shining element in which the characters flounder 
and suffer becomes rich and beautiful for them, as 
well as in so many ways for us, by the action of the 
writer's mind. They not only live in his imagination, 
but they borrow it from him in quantities; indeed 
without this charitable advance they would be poor 
creatures enough, for they have in each case almost 
nothing of their own. On the aid thus received they 
start, they get into motion; it makes their common 
basis of "passion," desire, enchantment, aversion. 
The essence of the situation is the same in "II Trionfo" 
and "II Fuoco" as in "LTnnocente": the tempo- 
rarily united pair devour each other, tear and rend 
each other, wear each other out through a series of 
erotic convulsions and nervous reactions that are made 
interesting — interesting to us — almost exclusively by 
the special wealth of their consciousness. The me- 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 263 

dium in which they move is admirably reflected in it; 
the autumn light of Venice, the afterglow of her past, 
in the drama of the elderly actress and the young 
rhetorician of "II Fuoco ,, ; the splendour of the sum- 
mer by the edge of the lower Adriatic in that of the 
two isolated erotomaniacs of "II Trionfo," indissolu- 
bly linked at last in the fury of physical destruction 
into which the man drags the woman by way of retri- 
bution for the fury of physical surrender into which 
she has beguiled him. 

As for "LTnnocente" again, briefly, there is perhaps 
nothing in it to match the Roman passages of "II 
Piacere"; but the harmony of the general, the outer 
conditions pervades the picture; the sweetness of the 
villeggiatura life, the happiness of place and air, the 
lovability of the enclosing scene, all at variance with 
the sharpness of the inner tragedy. The inner tragedy 
of "LTnnocente ,, has a concentration that is like the 
carrying, through turns and twists, upstairs and down, 
of some cup filled to the brim, of which no drop is yet 
spilled; such cumulative truth rules the scene after 
we have once accepted the postulate. It is true that 
the situation as exhibited involves for Giuliana, the 
young wife, the vulgarest of adventures; yet she be- 
comes, as it unfolds, the figure of the whole gallery 
in whom the pathetic has at once most of immediate 
truth and of investing poetry. I much prefer her for 
beauty and interest to Donna Maria in "II Piacere, ,, 
the principal other image of faith and patience sac- 
rificed. We see these virtues as still supreme in her 
even while she faces, in advance, her ordeal, in respect 
to which it has been her hope, in fact her calculation, 
that her husband will have been deceived about the 



264 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

paternity of her child; and she is so truthfully touch- 
ing when this possibility breaks down that even though 
we rub our eyes at the kind of dignity claimed for her 
we participate without reserve in her predicament. 
The origin of the infant is frankly ignoble, whereas it 
is on the nobleness of Giuliana that the story essen- 
tially hinges; but the contradiction is wonderfully kept 
from disconcerting us altogether. What the author 
has needed for his strangest truth is that the mother 
shall feel exactly as the husband does, and that the 
husband shall after the first shock of his horror 
feel intimately and explicitly with the mother. They 
take in this way the same view of their woeful ex- 
crescence; and the drama of the child's advent and of 
the first months of his existence, his insistent and 
hated survival, becomes for them in respect to the rest 
of the world a drama of silence and dissimulation, in 
every step of which we feel a terror. 

The effect, I may add, gains more than one kind of 
intensity from that almost complete absence of other 
contacts to which D'Annunzio systematically con- 
demns his creatures; introducing here, however, just 
the two or three that more completely mark the 
isolation. It may doubtless be conceded that our 
English-speaking failure of insistence, of inquiry and 
penetration, in certain directions, springs partly from 
our deep-rooted habit of dealing with man, dramati- 
cally, on his social and gregarious side, as a being the 
variety of whose intercourse with his fellows, whatever 
forms his fellows may take, is positively half his interest- 
ing motion. We fear to isolate him, for we remember 
that as we see and know him he scarce understands 
himself save in action, action which inevitably mixes 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 265 

him with his kind. To see and know him, like Signor 
D'Annunzio, almost only in passion is another matter, 
for passion spends itself quickly in the open and burns 
hot mainly in nooks and corners. Nothing, too, in 
the picture is more striking than the manner in which 
the merely sentimental abyss — that of the couple 
brought together by the thing that might utterly have 
severed them — is consistently and successfully avoided. 
We should have been certain to feel it in many other 
hands yawning but a few steps off. We see the dread- 
ful facts in themselves, are brought close to them with 
no interposing vaguenesses or other beggings of the 
question, and are forcibly reminded how much more 
this "crudity" makes for the communication of ten- 
derness — what is aimed at — than an attitude conven- 
tionally more reticent. We feel what the tenderness 
can be when it rests on all the items of a constituted 
misery, not one of which is illogically blinked. 

For the pangs and pities of the flesh in especial 
D'Annunzio has in all his work the finest hand — those 
of the spirit exist with him indeed only as proceeding 
from these; so that Giuliana for instance affects us, 
beyond any figure in fiction we are likely to remember, 
as living and breathing under our touch and before 
our eyes, as a creature of organs, functions and proc- 
esses, palpable, audible, pitiful physical conditions. 
These are facts, many of them, of an order in pursuit 
of which many a spectator of the "picture of life" will 
instinctively desire to stop short, however great in 
general his professed desire to enjoy the borrowed 
consciousness that the picture of life gives us; and 
nothing, it may well be said, is more certain than that 
we have a right in such matters to our preference, a 



266 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

right to choose the kind of adventure of the imagina- 
tion we like best. No obligation whatever rests on 
us in respect to a given kind — much light as our choice 
may often throw for the critic on the nature of our own 
intelligence. There at any rate, we are disposed to 
say of such a piece of penetration as "LTnnocente," 
there is a particular dreadful adventure, as large as 
life, for those who can bear it. The conditions are all 
present; it is only the reader himself who may break 
down. When in general, it may be added, we see 
readers do so, this is truly more often because they are 
shocked at really finding the last consistency than 
because they are shocked at missing it. 

"II Trionfo della Morte" and "II Fuoco" stand 
together as the amplest and richest of our author's 
histories, and the earlier, and more rounded and fault- 
less thing of the two, is not unlikely to serve, I should 
judge, as an unsurpassable example of his talent. His 
accomplishment here reaches its maximum; all his 
powers fight for him; the wealth of his expression 
drapes the situation represented in a mantle of vo- 
luminous folds, stiff with elaborate embroidery. The 
"story" may be told in three words: how Giorgio 
Aurispa meets in Rome the young and extremely pretty 
wife of a vulgar man of business, her unhappiness 
with whom is complete, and, falling in love with her 
on the spot, eventually persuades her — after many 
troubled passages — to come and pass a series of weeks 
with him in a "hermitage" by the summer sea, where, in 
a delirium of free possession, he grows so to hate her, 
and to hate himself for his subjection to her, and for 
the prostration of all honour and decency proceeding 
from it, that his desire to destroy her even at the cost 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 267 

of perishing with her at last takes uncontrollable form 
and he drags her, under a pretext, to the edge of a 
sea-cliff and hurls her, interlocked with him in appalled 
resistance, into space. We get at an early stage the 
note of that aridity of agitation in which the narrator 
has expended treasures of art in trying to interest us. 
"Fits of indescribable fury made them try which could 
torture each other best, which most lacerate the other's 
heart and keep it in martyrdom." But they under- 
stand, at least the hero does; and he formulates for his 
companion the essence of their impasse. It is not her 
fault when she tears and rends. 

Each human soul carries in it for love but a determinate quan- 
tity of sensitive force. It is inevitable that this quantity should 
use itself up with time, as everything else does; so that when it is 
used up no effort has power to prevent love from ceasing. Now it's 
a long time that you have been loving me; nearly two years ! 

The young man's intelligence is of the clearest; the 
woman's here is inferior, though in "II Fuoco" the two 
opposed faculties are almost equal; but the pair are 
alike far from living in their intelligence, which only 
serves to bestrew with lurid gleams the black darkness 
of their sensual life. So far as the intelligence is one 
with the will our author fundamentally treats it as cut 
off from all communication with any other quarter — 
that is with the senses arrayed and encamped. The 
most his unfortunates arrive at is to carry their ex- 
tremely embellished minds with them through these 
dusky passages as a kind of gilded glimmering lantern, 
the effect of which is merely fantastic and ironic — a 
thing to make the play of their shadows over the walls 
of their catacomb more monstrous and sinister. Again 
in the first pages of "II Trionfo" the glimmer is given. 



268 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

He recognised the injustice of any resentment against her, be- 
cause he recognised the fatal necessities that controlled them alike. 
No, his misery came from no other human creature; it came from 
the very essence of life. The lover had not the lover to complain 
of, but simply love itself. Love, toward which his whole being 
reached out, from within, with a rush not to be checked, love was 
of all the sad things of this earth the most lamentably sad. And 
to this supreme sadness he was perhaps condemned till death. 



That, in a nutshell, is D'Annunzio's subject-matter; 
not simply that his characters see in advance what 
love is worth for them, but that they nevertheless need 
to make it the totality of their consciousness. In 
"II Trionfo" and "II Fuoco" the law just expressed 
is put into play at the expense of the woman, with 
the difference, however, that in the latter tale the 
woman perceives and judges, suffers in mind, so to 
speak, as well as in nerves and in temper. But it 
would be hard to say in which of these two produc- 
tions the inexhaustible magic of Italy most helps the 
effect, most hangs over the story in such a way as to 
be one with it and to make the ugliness and the beauty 
melt together. The ugliness, it is to be noted, is con- 
tinually presumed absent; the pursuit and cultivation 
of beauty — that fruitful preoccupation which above all, 
I have said, gives the author his value as our "case" — 
being the very ground on which the whole thing rests. 
The ugliness is an accident, a treachery of fate, the 
intrusion of a foreign substance — having for the most 
part in the scheme itself no admitted inevitability. 
Against it every provision is made that the most de- 
veloped taste in the world can suggest; for, ostensibly, 
transcendently, Signor D'Annunzio's is the most de- 
veloped taste in the world — his and that of the fero- 
cious yet so contracted conoscenti his heroes, whose 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 269 

virtual identity with himself, affirmed with a strangely 
misplaced complacency by some of his critics, one would 
surely hesitate to take for granted. It is the won- 
drous physical and other endowments of the two hero- 
ines of "II Piacere." it is the joy and splendour of the 
hero's intercourse with them, to say nothing of the lustre 
of his own person, descent, talents, possessions, and 
of the great general setting in which everything is 
offered us — it is all this that makes up the picture, 
with the constant suggestion that nothing of a baser 
quality for the esthetic sense, or at the worst for a pam- 
pered curiosity, might hope so much as to live in it. 
The case is the same in "LTnnocente," a scene all 
primarily smothered in flowers and fruits and fra- 
grances and soft Italian airs, in every implication of 
flattered embowered constantly-renewed desire, which 
happens to be a blighted felicity only for the very 
reason that the cultivation of delight — in the form of 
the wife's luckless experiment — has so awkwardly 
overleaped itself. Whatever furthermore we may re- 
flectively think either of the Ippolita of "II Trionfo' , 
or of her companion's scheme of existence with her, it 
is enchanting grace, strange, original, irresistible in 
kind and degree, that she is given us as representing; 
just as her material situation with her young man 
during the greater part of the tale is a constant com- 
munion, for both of them, with the poetry and the 
nobleness of classic landscape, of nature consecrated 
by association. 

The mixture reaches its maximum, however, in 
"II Fuoco," if not perhaps in "The Virgins of the 
Rocks"; the mixture I mean of every exhibited ele- 
ment of personal charm, distinction and interest, with 



2 7 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

every insidious local influence, every glamour of place, 
season and surrounding object. The heroine of the 
first-named is a great tragic actress, exquisite of 
aspect, intelligence and magnanimity, exquisite for 
everything but for being unfortunately middle-aged, 
battered, marked, as we are constantly reminded, by 
all the after-sense of a career of promiscuous carnal 
connections. The hero is a man of letters, a poet, a 
dramatist of infinite reputation and resource, and their 
union is steeped to the eyes in the gorgeous medium 
of Venice, the moods of whose melancholy and the 
voices of whose past are an active part of the perpet- 
ual concert. But we see all the persons introduced to 
us yearn and strain to exercise their perceptions and 
taste their impressions as deeply as possible, conspir- 
ing together to interweave them with the pleasures of 
passion. They "go in" as the phrase is, for beauty at 
any cost — for each other's own to begin with; their 
creator, in the inspiring quest, presses them hard, and 
the whole effect becomes for us that of an organised 
general sacrifice to it and an organised general repudia- 
tion of everything else. It is not idle to repeat that 
the value of the Italian background has to this end 
been inestimable, and that every spark of poetry it 
had to contribute has been struck from it — with what 
supreme felicity we perhaps most admiringly learn 
in "The Virgins of the Rocks. " To measure the 
assistance thus rendered, and especially the immense 
literary lift given, we have only to ask ourselves what 
appearance any one of the situations presented would 
have made in almost any Cisalpine or "northern" 
frame of circumstance whatever. Supported but by 
such associations of local or of literary elegance as our 
comparatively thin resources are able to furnish, the 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 271 

latent weakness in them all, the rock, as to final effect, 
on which they split and of which I shall presently 
speak, would be immeasurably less dissimulated. All 
this is the lesson of style, by which we here catch a 
writer in the very act of profiting after a curious double 
fashion. D'Annunzio arrives at it both by expression 
and by material — that is, by a whole side of the latter; 
so that with such energy at once and such good for- 
tune it would be odd indeed if he had not come far. 
It is verily in the very name and interest of beauty, of 
the lovely impression, that Giorgio Aurispa becomes 
homicidal in thought and finally in act. 

She would in death become for me matter of thought, pure 
ideality. From a precarious and imperfect existence she would 
enter into an existence complete and definitive, forsaking forever 
the infirmity of her weak luxurious flesh. Destroy to possess — 
there is no other way for him who seeks the absolute in love. 

To these reflections he has been brought by the long, 
dangerous past which, as the author says, his connec- 
tion with his mistress has behind it — a past of recrim- 
inations of which the ghosts still walk. "It dragged 
behind it, through time, an immense dark net, all full 
of dead things." To quote here at all is always to 
desire to continue, and "II Trionfo" abounds in the 
illustrative episodes that are ever made so masterfully 
concrete. Offering in strictness, incidentally, the only 
exhibition in all the five volumes of a human relation 
other than the acutely sexual, it deals admirably 
enough with this opportunity when the hero pays his 
visit to his provincial parents before settling with his 
mistress at their hermitage. His people are of ancient 
race and have been much at their ease; but the home 
in the old Apulian town, overdarkened by the mis- 



272 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

deeds of a demoralised father, is on the verge of ruin, 
and the dull mean despair of it all, lighted by out- 
breaks of helpless rage on the part of the injured mother, 
is more than the visitor can bear, absorbed as he is in 
impatiences and concupiscences which make every- 
thing else cease to exist for him. His terror of the 
place and its troubles but exposes of course the abjec- 
tion of his weakness, and the sordid squabbles, the 
general misery and mediocrity of life that he has to 
face, constitute precisely, for his personal design, the 
abhorred challenge of ugliness, the interference of a 
call other than erotic. He flees before it, leaving it to 
make shift as it can; but nothing could be more " ren- 
dered" in detail than his overwhelmed vision of it. 

So with the other finest passages of the story, no- 
tably the summer day spent by the lovers in a long 
dusty dreadful pilgrimage to a famous local miracle- 
working shrine, where they mingle with the multitude 
of the stricken, the deformed, the hideous, the barely 
human, and from which they return, disgusted and 
appalled, to plunge deeper into consoling but too tem- 
porary transports; notably also the incident, masterly 
in every touch, of the little drowned contadino, the 
whole scene of the small starved dead child on the 
beach, in all the beauty of light and air and view, with 
the effusions and vociferations and grimnesses round 
him, the sights and sounds of the quasi-barbaric life 
that have the relief of antique rites portrayed on old 
tombs and urns, that quality and dignity of looming 
larger which a great feeling on the painter's part ever 
gives to small things. With this ampler truth the last 
page of the book is above all invested, the description 
of the supreme moment — for some time previous creep 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 273 

ing nearer and nearer — at which the delirious protag- 
onist beguiles his vaguely but not fully suspicious 
companion into coming out with him toward the edge 
of a dizzy place over the sea, where he suddenly grasps 
her for her doom and the sense of his awful intention, 
flashing a light back as into their monstrous past, 
makes her shriek for her life. She dodges him at the 
first betrayal, panting and trembling. 

"Are you crazy ?" she cried with wrath in her throat. "Are you 
crazy ?" But as she saw him make for her afresh in silence, as she 
felt herself seized with still harsher violence and dragged afresh 
toward her danger, she understood it all in a great sinister flash 
which blasted her soul with terror. "No, no, Giorgio! Let me 
go ! Let me go ! Another minute — listen, listen ! Just a minute ! 

I want to say ! " She supplicated, mad with terror, getting 

herself free and hoping to make him wait, to put him off with pity. 
"A minute! Listen! I love you! Forgive me! Forgive me!" 
She stammered incoherent words, desperate, feeling herself over- 
come, losing her ground, seeing death close. "Murder!" she then 
yelled in her fury. And she defended herself with her nails, with 
her teeth, biting like a wild beast. "Murder!" she yelled, feeling 
herself seized by the hair, felled to the ground on the edge of the 
precipice, lost. The dog meanwhile barked out at the scuffle. 
The struggle was short and ferocious, as between implacable ene- 
mies who had been nursing to this hour in the depths of their souls 
an intensity of hate. And they plunged into death locked together. 

The wonder-working shrine of the Abruzzi, to which 
they have previously made their way, is a local Lourdes, 
the resort from far and wide of the physically afflicted, 
the evocation of whose multitudinous presence, the 
description of whose unimaginable miseries and ec- 
stasies, grovelling struggles and supplications, has the 
mark of a pictorial energy for such matters not in- 
ferior to that of £mile Zola — to the degree even that 
the originality of the pages in question was, if I re- 



274 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

member rightly, rather sharply impugned in Paris. 
D'Annunzio's defence, however, was easy, residing 
as it does in the fact that to handle any subject suc- 
cessfully handled by Zola (his failures are another 
matter) is quite inevitably to walk more or less in his 
footsteps, in prints so wide and deep as to leave little 
margin for passing round them. To which I may 
add that, though the judgment may appear odd, the 
truth and force of the young man's few abject days at 
Guardiagrele, his casa paterna, are such as to make 
us wish that other such corners of life were more fre- 
quent in the author's pages. He has the supremely 
interesting quality in the novelist that he fixes, as it 
were, the tone of every cluster of objects he approaches, 
fixes it by the consistency and intensity of his repro- 
duction. In "The Virgins of the Rocks" we have also 
a casa faterna, and a thing, as I have indicated, of 
exquisite and wonderful tone; but the tone here is of 
poetry, the truth and the force are less measurable 
and less familiar, and the whole question, after all, 
in its refined and attenuated form, is still that of 
sexual pursuit, which keeps it within the writer's too 
frequent limits. Giorgio Aurispa, in "II Trionfo," 
lives in communion with the spirit of an amiable and 
melancholy uncle who had committed suicide and 
made him the heir of his fortune, and one of the 
nephew's most frequent and faithful loyalties is to 
hark back, in thought, to the horror of his first knowl- 
edge of the dead man's act, put before us always with 
its accompaniment of loud southern resonance and 
confusion. He is in the place again, he is in the room, 
at Guardiagrele, of the original appalled vision. 

He heard, in the stillness of the air and of his arrested soul, the 
small shrill of an insect in the wainscot. And the little fact sufficed 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 275 

to dissipate for the moment the extreme violence of his nervous 
tension, as the puncture of a needle suffices to empty a swollen 
bladder. Every particular of the terrible day came back to his 
memory: the news abruptly brought to Torretta di Sarsa, toward 
three in the afternoon, by a panting messenger who stammered 
and whimpered; the ride on horseback, at lightning speed, under 
the canicular sky and up the torrid slopes, and, during the rush, 
the sudden faintnesses that turned him dizzy in his saddle; then the 
house at home, filled with sobs, filled with a noise of doors slamming 
in the general scare, filled with the strumming of his own arteries; 
and at last his irruption into the room, the sight of the corpse, the 
curtains inflated and rustling, the tinkle on the wall of the little 
font for holy water. 

This young man's great mistake, we are told, had 
been his insistence on regarding love as a form of en- 
joyment. He would have been in a possible relation 
to it only if he had learned to deal with it as a form of 
suffering. This is the lesson brought home to the 
heroine of "II Fuoco, ,, who suffers indeed, as it seems 
to us, so much more than is involved in the occasion. 
We ask ourselves continually why; that is we do so at 
first; we do so before the special force of the book takes 
us captive and reduces us to mere charmed absorption 
of its successive parts and indifference to its moral 
sense. Its defect is verily that it has no moral sense 
proportionate to the truth, the constant high style 
of the general picture; and this fact makes the whole 
thing appear given us simply because it has happened, 
because it was material that the author had become 
possessed of, and not because, in its almost journalistic 
"actuality," it has any large meaning. We get the im- 
pression of a direct transfer, a "lift," bodily, of some- 
thing seen and known, something not really produced 
by the chemical process of art, the crucible or retort 
from which things emerge for a new function. Their 



276 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

meaning here at any rate, extracted with difficulty, 
would seem to be that there is an inevitable leak of 
ease and peace when a mistress happens to be con- 
siderably older than her lover; but even this interesting 
yet not unfamiliar truth loses itself in the great poetic, 
pathetic, psychologic ceremonial. 

That matters little indeed, as I say, while we read; 
the two sensibilities concerned bloom, in all the Vene- 
tian glow, like wondrous water-plants, throwing out 
branches and flowers of which we admire the fantastic 
growth even while we remain, botanically speaking, be- 
wildered. They are other sensibilities than those 
with which we ourselves have community — one of the 
main reasons of their appearing so I shall presently ex- 
plain; and, besides, they are isolated, sequestrated, ac- 
cording to D'Annunzio's constant view of such cases, 
for an exclusive, an intensified and arid development. 
The mistress has, abnormally, none of the protection, 
the alternative life, the saving sanity of other inter- 
ests, ties, employments; while the hero, a young poet 
and dramatist with an immense consciousness of 
genius and fame, has for the time at least only those 
poor contacts with existence that the last intimacies 
of his contact with his friend's person, her poor corpo 
non piu giovane, as he so frequently repeats, represent 
for him. It is not for us, however, to contest the 
relation; it is in the penetrating way again in which 
the relation is rendered that the writer has his triumph; 
the way above all in which the world-weary interest- 
ing sensitive woman, with her infinite intelligence, yet 
with her longing for some happiness still among all her 
experiments untasted, and her genius at the same time 
for familiar misery, is marked, featured, individualised 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 277 

for us, and, with the strangest art in the world — one 
of those mysteries of which great talents alone have 
the trick — at once ennobled with beauty and dese- 
crated by a process that we somehow feel to be that of 
exposure, to spring from some violation of a privilege. 
" 'Do with me,' " says the Foscarina on a certain oc- 
casion, " 'whatever you will'; and she smiled in her 
offered abjection. She belonged to him like the thing 
one holds in one's fist, like the ring on one's finger, 
like a glove, like a garment, like a word that may be 
spoken or not, like a draught that may be drunk or 
poured on the ground." There are some lines describ- 
ing an hour in which she has made him feel as never 
before "the incalculable capacity of the heart of man. 
And it seemed to him as he heard the beating of his 
own heart and divined the violence of the other be- 
side him that he had in his ears the loud repercussion 
of the hammer on the hard anvil where human destiny 
is forged." More than ever here the pitch of the 
personal drama is taken up by everything else in the 
scene — everything else being in fact but the immediate 
presence of Venice, her old faded colour and old vague 
harmonies, played with constantly as we might play 
with some rosy fretted faintly-sounding sea-shell. 

It would take time to say what we play with in the 
silver-toned "Virgins of the Rocks," the history of a 
visit paid by a transcendent young man — always pretty 
much the same young man — to an illustrious family 
whose fortunes have tragically shrunken with the ex- 
pulsion of the Bourbons from the kingdom of Naples, 
and the three last lovely daughters of whose house 
are beginning to wither on the stem, undiscovered, un- 
sought, in a dilapidated old palace, an old garden of 



278 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

neglected pomp, a place of fountains and colonnades, 
marble steps and statues, all circled with hard bright 
sun-scorched volcanic scenery. They are tacitly can- 
didates for the honour of the hero's hand, and the sub- 
ject of the little tale, which deals with scarce more than 
a few summer days, is the manner of their presenting 
themselves for his admiration and his choice. I de- 
cidedly name this exquisite composition as my pre- 
ferred of the series; for if its tone is thoroughly romantic 
the romance is yet of the happiest kind, the kind that 
consists in the imaginative development of observable 
things, things present, significant, related to us, and 
not in a weak false fumble for the remote and the dis- 
connected. 

It is indeed the romantic mind itself that makes the 
picture, and there could be no better case of the abso- 
lute artistic vision. The mere facts are soon said; the 
main fact, above all, of the feeble remnant of an ex- 
hausted race waiting in impotence to see itself cease 
to be. The father has nothing personal left but the 
ruins of his fine presence and of his old superstitions, 
a handful of silver dust; the mother, mad and under 
supervision, stalks about with the delusion of imperial 
greatness (there is a wonderful page on her parading 
through the gardens in her rococo palanquin, like a 
Byzantine empress, attended by sordid keepers, while 
the others are hushed into pity and awe) ; the two sons, 
hereditarily tainted, are virtually imbecile; the three 
daughters, candidly considered, are what we should 
regard in our Anglo-Saxon world as but the stuff of 
rather particularly dreary and shabby, quite unutter- 
ably idle old maids. Nothing, within the picture, 
occurs; nothing is done or, more acutely than usual, 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 279 

than everywhere, suffered; it is all a mere affair of 
the rich impression, the complexity of images projected 
upon the quintessential spirit of the hero, whose own 
report is what we have — an affair of the quality of 
observation, sentiment and eloquence brought to bear. 
It is not too much to say even that the whole thing 
is in the largest sense but a theme for style, style of 
substance as well as of form. Within this compass it 
blooms and quivers and shimmers with light, becomes 
a wonderful little walled garden of romance. The 
young man has a passage of extreme but respectful 
tenderness with each of the sisters in turn, and the 
general cumulative effect is scarcely impaired by the 
fact that "nothing comes" of any of these relations. 
Too little comes of anything, I think, for any very 
marked human analogy, inasmuch as if it is interesting 
to be puzzled to a certain extent by what an action, 
placed before us, is designed to show or to signify, so 
we require for this refined amusement at least the sense 
that some general idea is represented. We must feel 
it present. 

Therefore if making out nothing very distinct in "Le 
Vergini" but the pictorial idea, and yet cleaving to 
the preference I have expressed, I let the anomaly pass 
as a tribute extorted by literary art, I may seem to 
imply that a book may have a great interest without 
showing a perfect sense. The truth is undoubtedly 
that I am in some degree beguiled and bribed by the 
particularly intense expression given in these pages to 
the author's esthetic faith. If he is so supremely a 
"case" it is because this production has so much to 
say for it, and says it with such a pride of confidence, 
with an assurance and an elegance that fairly make it 



2 8o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

the last conceivable word of such a profession. The 
observations recorded have their origin in the nar- 
rator's passionate reaction against the vulgarity of the 
day. All the writer's young men react; but Cantelmo, 
in the volume before us, reacts with the finest con- 
tempt. He is, like his brothers, a raffine conservative, 
believing really, so far as we understand it, only in 
the virtue of "race" and in the grand manner. The 
blighted Virgins, with all that surrounds them, are an 
affirmation of the grand manner — that is of the shame 
and scandal of what in an odious age it has been re- 
duced to. It consists indeed of a number of different 
things which I may not pretend to have completely 
fitted together, but which are, with other elements, the 
sense of the supremacy of beauty, the supremacy of 
style and, last not least, of the personal will, mani- 
fested for the most part as a cold insolence of attitude 
— not manifested as anything much more edifying. 
What it really appears to come to is that the will is 
a sort of romantic ornament, the application of which, 
for life in the present and the future, remains awk- 
wardly vague, though we are always to remember that 
it has been splendidly forged in the past. The will in 
short is beauty, is style, is elegance, is art — especially 
in members of great families and possessors of large 
fortunes. That of the hero of "Le Vergini" has been 
handed down to him direct, as by a series of testamen- 
tary provisions, from a splendid young ancestor for 
whose memory and whose portrait he has a worship, 
a warrior and virtuoso of the Renaissance, the model 
of his spirit. 



, 



He represents for me the mysterious meaning of the power o 
style, not violable by any one, and least of all ever by myself in 
my own person. 






GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 281 

And elsewhere: — 

The sublime hands of Violante [the beauty and interest of hands 
play a great part, in general, in the picture], pressing out in drops 
the essence of the tender flowers and letting them fall bruised to 
the ground, performed an act which, as a symbol, corresponded 
perfectly to the character of my style; this being ever to extract 
from a thing its very last scent of life, to take from it all it could 
give and leave it exhausted. Was not this one of the most im- 
portant offices of my art of life ? 

The book is a singularly rich exhibition of an inward 
state, the state of private poetic intercourse with things, 
the kind of current that in a given personal experience 
flows to and fro between the imagination and the world. 
It represents the esthetic consciousness, proud of its 
conquests and discoveries, and yet trying, after all, as 
with the vexed sense of a want, to look through other 
windows and eyes. It goes all lengths, as is of course 
indispensable on behalf of a personage constituting a 
case. "I firmly believe that the greatest sum of future 
dominion will be precisely that which shall have its 
base and its apex in Rome" — such being in our person- 
age the confidence of the " Latin" spirit. Does it not 
really all come back to style ? It was to the Latin 
spirit that the Renaissance was primarily vouchsafed; 
and was not, for a simplified statement, the last word 
of the Renaissance the question of taste ? That is the 
esthetic question; and when the Latin spirit after many 
misadventures again clears itself we shall see how all 
the while this treasure has been in its keeping. Let us 
as frankly as possible add that there is a whole side on 
which the clearance may appear to have made quite a 
splendid advance with Signor D'Annunzio himself. 

But there is another side, which I have been too long 
in coming to, yet which I confess is for me much the 



282 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

more interesting. No account of our author is com- 
plete unless we really make out what becomes of that 
esthetic consistency in him which, as I have said, our 
own collective and cultivated effort is so earnestly at- 
tempting and yet so pathetically, if not so grotesquely, 
missing. We are struck, unmistakably, early in our 
acquaintance with these productions, by the fact that 
their total beauty somehow extraordinarily fails to 
march with their beauty of parts, and that something 
is all the while at work undermining that bulwark 
against ugliness which it is their obvious theory of their 
own office to throw up. The disparity troubles and 
haunts us just in proportion as we admire; and our 
uneasy wonderment over the source of the weakness 
fails to spoil our pleasure only because such questions 
have so lively an interest for the critic. We feel our- 
selves somehow in presence of a singular incessant leak 
in the effect of distinction so artfully and copiously 
produced, and we apply our test up and down in the 
manner of the inquiring person who, with a tin imple- 
ment and a small flame, searches our premises for an 
escape of gas. The bad smell has, as it were, to be 
accounted for; and yet where, amid the roses and 
lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and fra- 
grances, can such a thing possibly be ? Quite abruptly, 
I think, at last (if we have been much under the spell) 
our test gives us the news, not unaccompanied with 
the shock with which we see our escape of gas spring 
into flame. There is no mistaking it; the leak of dis- 
tinction is produced by a positive element of the vul- 
gar; and that the vulgar should flourish in an air so 
charged, intellectually speaking, with the "aristocratic" 
element, becomes for us straightway the greatest of 
oddities and at the same time, critically speaking, one 
of the most interesting things conceivable. 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 283 

The interest then springs from its being involved for 
us in the "case." We recognise so many suggested 
consequences if the case is really to prove responsible 
for it. We ask ourselves if there be not a connection, 
we almost tremble lest there shouldn't be; since what 
is more obvious than that, if a high example of exclu- 
sive estheticism — as high a one as we are likely ever 
to meet — is bound sooner or later to spring a leak, the 
general question receives much light ? We recognise 
here the value of our author's complete consistency: 
he would have kept his bottom sound, so to speak, 
had he not remained so long at sea. If those imper- 
fect exponents of his faith whom we have noted among 
ourselves fail to flower, for a climax, in any proportion- 
ate way, we make out that they are embarrassed not 
so much by any force they possess as by a force — a 
force of temperament — that they lack. The anomaly 
I speak of presents itself thus as the dilemma in which 
Signor D'Annunzio's consistency has inexorably landed 
him; and the disfigurement breaks out, strikingly 
enough, in the very forefront of his picture, at the 
point where he has most lavished his colour. It is 
where he has most trusted and depended that he is 
most betrayed, the traitor sharing certainly his tent 
and his confidence. What is it that in the interest of 
beauty he most elaborately builds on if not on the love- 
affairs of his heroes and heroines, if not on his exhibi- 
tion of the free play, the sincere play, the play closely 
studied and frankly represented, of the sexual relation ? 
It is round this exercise, for him, that expressible, 
demonstrable, communicable beauty prevailingly clus- 
ters; a view indeed as to which we all generously go 
with him, subject to the reserve for each of us of our 
own expression and demonstration. It is these things 



284 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

on his part that break down, it is his discrimination 
that falls short, and thereby the very kind of intel- 
lectual authority most implied by his pretension. 
There is according to him an immense amenity that 
can be saved — saved by style — from the general wreck 
and welter of what is most precious, from the bank- 
ruptcy determined more and more by our basely demo- 
cratic conditions. As we watch the actual process, 
however, it is only to see the lifeboat itself founder. 
The vulgarity into which he so incongruously drops is, 
I will not say the space he allots to love-affairs, but 
the weakness of his sense of "values" in depicting 
them. 

We begin to ask ourselves at an early stage what 
this queer passion may be in the representation of 
which the sense of beauty ostensibly finds its richest 
expression and which is yet attended by nothing else 
at all — neither duration, nor propagation, nor common 
kindness, nor common consistency with other relations, 
common congruity with the rest of life — to make its 
importance good. If beauty is the supreme need so 
let it be; nothing is more certain than that we can 
never get too much of it if only we get it of the right 
sort. It is therefore on this very ground — the ground 
of its own sufficiency — that Signor D'Annunzio's in- 
vocation of it collapses at our challenge. The vul- 
garity comes from the disorder really introduced into 
values, as I have called them; from the vitiation suf- 
fered — that we should have to record so mean an acci- 
dent — by taste, impeccable taste, itself. The truth of 
this would come out fully in copious examples, now 
impossible; but it is not too much to say, I think, 
that in every principal situation presented the funda- 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 285 

mental weakness causes the particular interest to be 
inordinately compromised. 

I must not, I know, make too much of "II Piacere" 
— one of those works of promising youth with which 
criticism is always easy — and I should indeed say 
nothing of it if it were also a work of less ability. It 
really, however, to my mind, quite gives us the key, 
all in the morning early, to our author's general mis- 
adventure. Andrea Sperelli is the key; Donna Maria 
is another key of a slightly different shape. They have 
neither of them the esthetic importance, any more 
than the moral, that their narrator claims for them 
and in his elaborate insistence on which he has so 
hopelessly lost his way. If they were important — by 
which I mean if they showed in any other light than 
that of their particular erotic exercise — they would jus- 
tify the claim made for them with such superior art. 
They have no general history, since their history is 
only, and immediately and extravagantly, that of their 
too cheap and too easy romance. Why should the ca- 
reer of the young man be offered as a sample of pathetic, 
of tragic, of edifying corruption ? — in which case it 
might indeed be matter for earnest exhibition. The 
march of corruption, the insidious influence of pro- 
pinquity, opportunity, example, the ravage of false es- 
timates and the drama of sterilising passion — all this 
is a thinkable theme, thinkable especially in the light 
of a great talent. But for Andrea Sperelli there is not 
only no march, no drama, there is not even a weak- 
ness to give him the semblance of dramatic, of plastic 
material; he is solidly, invariably, vulgarly strong, and 
not a bit more corrupt at the end of his disorders than 
at the beginning. His erudition, his intellectual ac- 



286 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

complishments and elevation, are too easily spoken for; 
no view of him is given in which we can feel or taste 
them. Donna Maria is scarcely less signal an instance 
of the apparent desire on the author's part to impute 
a " value" defeated by his apparently not knowing 
what a value is. She is apparently an immense value 
for the occasions on which the couple secretly meet, 
but how is she otherwise one ? and what becomes 
therefore of the beauty, the interest, the pathos, the 
struggle, or whatever else, of her relation — relation of 
character, of judgment, even of mere taste — to her 
own collapse ? The immediate physical sensibility that 
surrenders in her is, as throughout, exquisitely painted; 
but since nothing operates for her, one way or the 
other, but that familiar faculty, we are left casting 
about us almost as much for what else she has to give 
as for what, in any case, she may wish to keep. 

The author's view of the whole matter of durations 
and dates, in these connections, gives the scale of 
" distinction" by itself a marked downward tilt; it 
confounds all differences between the trivial and the 
grave. Giuliana, in "LTnnocente," is interesting be- 
cause she has had a misadventure, and she is exquisite 
in her delineator's view because she has repented of 
it. But the misadventure, it appears, was a matter 
but of a minute; so that we oddly see this particular 
romance attenuated on the ground of its brevity. 
Given the claims of the exquisite, the attenuation 
should surely be sought in the very opposite quarter; 
since, where these remarkable affections are concerned, 
how otherwise than by the element of comparative 
duration do we obtain the element of comparative 
good faith, on which we depend for the element, in 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 287 

turn, of comparative dignity ? Andrea Sperelli be- 
comes in the course of a few weeks in Rome the lover 
of some twenty or thirty women of fashion — the num- 
ber scarce matters; but to make this possible his con- 
nection with each has but to last a day or two; and 
the effect of that in its order is to reduce to nothing, 
by vulgarity, by frank grotesqueness of association, 
the romantic capacity in him on which his chronicler's 
whole appeal to us is based. The association rising 
before us more nearly than any other is that of the 
manners observable in the most mimetic department 
of any great menagerie. 

The most serious relation depicted — in the sense of 
being in some degree the least suggestive of mere zo- 
ological sociability — is that of the lovers in "II Fuoco," 
as we also take this pair for their creator's sanest and 
most responsible spirits. It is a question between 
them of an heroic affection, and yet the affection ap- 
pears to make good for itself no place worth speaking 
of in their lives. It holds but for a scant few weeks; 
the autumn already reigns when the connection begins, 
and the connection is played out (or if it be not the 
ado is about nothing) with the first flush of the early 
Italian spring. It suddenly, on our hands, becomes 
trivial, with all our own estimate of reasons and reali- 
ties and congruities falsified. The Foscarina has, on 
professional business, to "go away," and the young 
poet has to do the same; but such a separation, so 
easily bridged over by such great people, makes a beg- 
garly climax for an intercourse on behalf of which all 
the forces of poetry and tragedy have been set in mo- 
tion. Where then we ask ourselves is the weakness ? 
— as we ask it, very much in the same way, in respect 



288 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

to the vulgarised aspect of the tragedy of Giorgio Au- 
rispa. The pang of pity, the pang that springs from 
a conceivable community in doom, is in this latter case 
altogether wanting. Directly we lift a little the em- 
broidered mantle of that gift for appearances which 
plays, on Signor D'Annunzio's part, such tricks upon 
us, we find ourselves put off, as the phrase is, with an 
inferior article. The inferior article is the hero's pov- 
erty of life, which cuts him down for pathetic interest 
just as the same limitation in "II Piacere" cuts down 
Donna Maria. Presented each as victims of another 
rapacious person who has got the better of them, there 
is no process, no complexity, no suspense in their 
story; and thereby, we submit, there is no esthetic 
beauty. Why shouldn't Giorgio Aurispa go mad ? 
Why shouldn't Stelio Effrena go away ? We make the 
inquiry as disconcerted spectators, not feeling in the 
former case that we have had any communication with 
the wretched youth's sanity, and not seeing in the lat- 
ter why the tie of all the passion that has been made 
so admirably vivid for us should not be able to weather 
change. 

Nothing is so singular with D'Annunzio as that the 
very basis and subject of his work should repeatedly 
go aground on such shallows as these. He takes for 
treatment a situation that is substantially none — the 
most fundamental this of his values, and all the more 
compromising that his immense art of producing illu- 
sions still leaves it exposed. The idea in each case is 
superficially specious, but where it breaks down is what 
makes all the difference. "II Piacere" would have 
meant what it seems to try to mean only if a provi- 
sion had been made in it for some adequate "inward- 






GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 289 

ness" on the part either of the nature disintegrated or 
of the other nature to which this poisoned contact 
proves fatal. "LTnnocente," of the group, comes 
nearest to justifying its idea; and I leave it unchal- 
lenged, though its meaning surely would have been 
written larger if the attitude of the wife toward her 
misbegotten child had been, in face of the husband's, 
a little less that of the dumb detached animal suffering 
in her simplicity. As a picture of such suffering, the 
pain of the mere dumb animal, the work is indeed 
magnificent; only its connections are poor with the 
higher dramatic, the higher poetic, complexity of 
things. 

I can only repeat that to make "The Triumph of 
Death" a fruitful thing we should have been able to 
measure the triumph by its frustration of some con- 
ceivable opportunity at least for life. There is a mo- 
ment at which we hope for something of this kind, 
the moment at which the young man pays his visit to 
his family, who have grievous need of him and toward 
whom we look to see some one side or other of his 
fine sensibility turn. But nothing comes of that for 
the simple reason that the personage is already dead 
— that nothing exists in him but the established fear 
of life. He turns his back on everything but a special 
sensation, and so completely shuts the door on the 
elements of contrast and curiosity. Death really tri- 
umphs, in the matter, but over the physical terror of 
the inordinate woman; a pang perfectly communi- 
cated to us, but too small a surface to bear the weight 
laid on it, which accordingly affects us as that of a 
pyramid turned over on its point. It is throughout 
one of D'Annunzio's strongest marks that he treats 



2 9 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

"love" as a matter not to be mixed with life, in the 
larger sense of the word, at all — as a matter all of 
whose other connections are dropped; a sort of secret 
game that can go on only if each of the parties has 
nothing to do, even on any other terms, with any one 
else. 



I have dwelt on the fact that the sentimental inten- 
tion in "II Fuoco" quite bewilderingly fails, in spite 
of the splendid accumulation of material. We wait to 
the end to see it declare itself, and then are left, as 
I have already indicated, with a mere meaningless 
anecdote on our hands. Brilliant and free, each 
freighted with a talent that is given us as incompara- 
ble, the parties to the combination depicted have, for 
their affection, the whole world before them — and not 
the simple terraqueous globe, but that still vaster 
sphere of the imagination in which, by an excep- 
tionally happy chance, they are able to move together 
on very nearly equal terms. A tragedy is a tragedy, 
a comedy is a comedy, when the effect, in either sense, 
is determined for us, determined by the interference of 
some element that starts a complication or precipitates 
an action. As in "II Fuoco" nothing whatever inter- 
feres — or nothing certainly that need weigh with the 
high spirits represented — we ask why such precious rev- 
elations are made us for nothing. Admirably made in 
themselves they yet strike us as, esthetically speaking, 
almost cruelly wasted. 

This general remark would hold good, as well, of 
"Le Vergini," if I might still linger, though its appli- 
cation has already been virtually made. Anatolia, in 






GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 291 

this tale, the most robust of the three sisters, declines 
marriage in order to devote herself to a family who 
have, it would certainly appear, signal need of her 
nursing. But this, though it sufficiently represents her 
situation, covers as little as possible the ground of the 
hero's own, since he, quivering intensely with the 
treasure of his "will," inherited in a straight line from 
the cinque-cento, only asks to affirm his sublimated 
energy. The temptation to affirm it erotically, at 
least, has been great for him in relation to each of the 
young women in turn; but it is for Anatolia that his 
admiration and affection most increase in volume, and 
it is accordingly for her sake that, with the wonderful 
moral force behind him (kept as in a Florentine casket,) 
we most look to see him justified. He has a fine image 
— and when has the author not fine images ? — to illus- 
trate the constant readiness of this possession. The 
young woman says something that inspires him, where- 
upon, "as a sudden light playing over the dusky wall 
of a room causes the motionless sword in a trophy to 
shine, so her word drew a great flash from my sus- 
pended volontd. There was a virtue in her," the nar- 
rator adds, "which could have produced portentous 
fruit. Her substance might have nourished a super- 
human germ." In spite of which it never succeeds in 
becoming so much as a question that his affection for 
her shall act, that this grand imagination in him shall 
operate, that he himself is, in virtue of such things, 
exactly the person to come to her aid and to combine 
with her in devotion. The talk about the volontd is 
amusing much in the same way as the complacency of 
a primitive man, unacquainted with the uses of things, 
who becomes possessed by some accident of one of the 
toys of civilisation, a watch or a motor-car. And yet 



292 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

artistically and for our author the will has an appli- 
cation, since without it he could have done no rare 
vivid work. 

Here at all events we put our finger, I think, on the 
very point at which his esthetic plenitude meets the 
misadventure that discredits it. We see just where it 
"joins on" with vulgarity. That sexual passion from 
which he extracts such admirable detached pictures in- 
sists on remaining for him only the act of a moment, 
beginning and ending in itself and disowning any rep- 
resentative character. From the moment it depends 
on itself alone for its beauty it endangers extremely 
its distinction, so precarious at the best. For what it 
represents, precisely, is it poetically interesting; it 
finds its extension and consummation only in the rest 
of life. Shut out from the rest of life, shut out from 
all fruition and assimilation, it has no more dignity 
than — to use a homely image — the boots and shoes 
that we see, in the corridors of promiscuous hotels, 
standing, often in double pairs, at the doors of rooms. 
Detached and unassociated these clusters of objects 
present, however obtruded, no importance. What the 
participants do with their agitation, in short, or even 
what it does with them, that is the stuff* of poetry, and 
it is never really interesting save when something 
finely contributive in themselves makes it so. It is 
this absence of anything finely contributive in them- 
selves, on the part of the various couples here con- 
cerned, that is the open door to the trivial. I have 
said, with all appreciation, that they present the great 
"relation," for intimacy, as we shall nowhere else find 
it presented; but to see it related, in its own turn, to 
nothing in the heaven above or the earth beneath, 



GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO 293 

this undermines, we definitely learn, the charm of that 
achievement. 

And so it is, strangely, that our esthetic "case" en- 
lightens us. The only question is whether it be the 
only case of the kind conceivable. May we not sup- 
pose another with the elements differently mixed ? 
May we not in imagination alter the proportions within 
or the influences without, and look with cheerfulness 
for a different issue ? Need the esthetic adventure, in 
a word, organised for real discovery, give us no more 
comforting news of success ? Are there not, so to 
speak, finer possible combinations ? are there not safe- 
guards against futility that in the example before us 
were but too presumably absent ? To which the sole 
answer probably is that no man can say. It is Signor 
D'Annunzio alone who has really sailed the sea and 
brought back the booty. The actual case is so good 
that all the potential fade beside it. It has for it 
that it exists, and that, whether for the strength of 
the original outfit or for the weight of the final testi- 
mony, it could scarce thinkably be bettered. 



MATILDE SERAO 

Few attentive readers, I take it, would deny that the 
English novelist — from whom, in this case, there hap- 
pens to be even less occasion than usual for distin- 
guishing the American — testifies in his art much more 
than his foreign comrade, from whatever quarter, to 
the rigour of convention. There are whole sides of 
life about which he has as little to say as possible, 
about which he observes indeed in general a silence 
that has visibly ended by becoming for the foreign 
comrade his great characteristic. He strikes the spec- 
tator as having with a misplaced humility consented 
once for all to be admonished as to what he shall or 
shall not "mention" — and to be admonished in espe- 
cial by an authority altogether indefinite. He sub- 
scribes, when his turn comes round, to an agreement 
in the drawing-up of which he has had no hand; he 
sits down to his task with a certain received canon of 
the " proper" before his eyes. The critic I am sup- 
posing reproaches him, naturally, in this critic's way, 
with a marked failure ever to challenge, much less to 
analyse, that conception; with having never, as would 
appear, so much as put to himself in regard to most 
of the matters of which he makes his mystery the 
simple question "Proper to what?" How can any 
authority, even the most embodied, asks the exponent 
of other views, decide for us in advance what shall in 
any case be proper — with the consequent implication 
of impropriety — to our given subject ? 

294 



MATILDE SERAO 295 

The English novelist would, I imagine, even some- 
times be led on to finding that he has practically had 
to meet such an overhauling by a further admission, 
though an admission still tacit and showing him not 
a little shy of the whole discussion — principles and for- 
mulas being in general, as we know, but little his 
affair. Would he not, if off his guard, have been in 
peril of lapsing into the doctrine — suicidal when re- 
flected upon — that there may be also an a priori rule, 
a "Thou shalt not," if not a "Thou shalt," as to treat- 
able subjects themselves ? Then it would be that his 
alien foe might fairly revel in the sense of having him 
in a corner, laughing an evil laugh to hear him plead 
in explanation that it is exactly most as to the sub- 
ject to be treated that he feels the need laid upon him 
to conform. What is he to do when he has an idea to 
embody, we might suspect him rashly to inquire, un- 
less, frankly to ask himself in the first place of all if 
it be proper ? Not indeed — we catch the reservation — 
that he is consciously often accessible to ideas for 
which that virtue may not be claimed. Naturally, 
however, still, such a plea only brings forth for his 
interlocutor a repetition of the original appeal: "Proper 
to what ?" There is only one propriety the painter of 
life can ask of his morsel of material: Is it, or is it 
not, of the stuff of life ? So, in simplified terms at 
any rate, I seem to hear the interchange; to which I 
need listen no longer than thus to have derived from 
it a word of support for my position. The question of 
our possible rejoinder to the scorn of societies other- 
wise affected I must leave for some other connection. 
The point is — if point I may expect to obtain any 
countenance to its being called — that, in spite of our 
great Dickens and, in a minor degree, of our great 



296 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

George Eliot, the limitations of our practice are else- 
where than among ourselves pretty well held to have 
put us out of court. The thing least conceded to us 
moreover is that we handle at all frankly — if we put 
forward such a claim — even our own subject-matter or 
in other words our own life. "Your own is all we 
want of you, all we should like to see. But that your 
system really touches your own is exactly what we 
deny. Never, never!" For what it really comes to 
is that practically we, of all people in the world, are 
accused of a system. Call this system a conspiracy of 
silence, and the whole charge is upon us. 

The fact of the silence, whether or no of the system, 
is fortunately all that at present concerns us. Did this 
not happen to be the case nothing could be more in- 
teresting, I think, than to follow somewhat further 
several of the bearings of the matter, which would 
bring us face to face with some wonderful and, I 
hasten to add, by no means doubtless merely discon- 
certing truths about ourselves. It has been given us 
to read a good deal, in these latter days, about Vame 
Frangaise and Vame Russe — and with the result, in all 
probability, of our being rather less than more pene- 
trated with the desire, in emulation of these oppor- 
tunities, to deliver ourselves upon the English or the 
American soul. There would appear to be nothing 
we are totally conscious of that we are less eager to 
reduce to the mere expressible, to hand over to pub- 
licity, current journalistic prose aiding, than either of 
these fine essences; and yet incontestably there are 
neighbourhoods in which we feel ourselves within scent 
and reach of them by something of the same sense 
that in thick forests serves the hunter of great game. 



MATILDE SERAO 297 

He may not quite touch the precious presence, but he 
knows when it is near. So somehow we know that 
the "Anglo-Saxon" soul, the modern at least, is not 
far off when we frankly consider the practice of our 
race — comparatively recent though it be — in taking 
for granted the "innocence" of literature. 

Our perhaps a trifle witless way of expressing our 
conception of this innocence and our desire for it is, 
characteristically enough, by taking refuge in another 
vagueness, by invoking the allowances that we under- 
stand works of imagination and of criticism to make 
to the "young." I know not whether it has ever offi- 
cially been stated for us that, given the young, given 
literature, and given, under stress, the need of sacri- 
ficing one or the other party, it is not certainly by 
our sense of "style" that our choice would be deter- 
mined : no great art in the reading of signs and symp- 
toms is at all events required for a view of our prob- 
able instinct in such a case. That instinct, however, 
has too many deep things in it to be briefly or easily 
disposed of, and there would be no greater mistake than 
to attempt too simple an account of it. The account 
most likely to be given by a completely detached critic 
would be that we are as a race better equipped for 
action than for thought, and that to let the art of 
expression go by the board is through that very fact 
to point to the limits of what we mostly have to express. 
If we accept such a report we shall do so, I think, 
rather from a strong than from a weak sense of what 
may easily be made of it; but I glance at these things 
only as at objects almost too flooded with light, and 
come back after my parenthesis to what more imme- 
diately concerns me: the plain reflection that, if the 



298 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

element of compromise — compromise with fifty of the 
"facts of life" — be the common feature of the novel 
of English speech, so it is mainly indebted for this 
character to the sex comparatively without a feeling 
for logic. 

Nothing is at any rate a priori more natural than 
to trace a connection between our general mildness, 
as it may conveniently be called, and the fact that 
we are likewise so generally feminine. Is the English 
novel "proper" because it is so much written by women, 
or is it only so much written by women because its 
propriety has been so firmly established ? The inti- 
mate relation is on either determination all that is 
here pertinent — effect and cause may be left to them- 
selves. What is further pertinent, as happens, is that 
on a near view the relation is not constant; by which 
I mean that, though the ladies are always productive, 
the fashion of mildness is not always the same. Con- 
vention in short has its ups and downs, and these vo- 
taries have of late years, I think, been as often seen 
weltering in the hollow of the wave as borne aloft on 
its crest. Some of them may even be held positively 
to have distinguished themselves most — whether or no 
in veils of anonymity — on the occasion of the down- 
ward movement; making us really wonder if their 
number might not fairly, under any steadier force of 
such a movement, be counted on to increase. All 
sorts of inquiries are suggested in truth by the sight. 
"Emancipations" are in the air, and may it not pos- 
sibly be that we shall see two of the most striking coin- 
cide ? If convention has, to the tune to which I just 
invited an ear, blighted our fiction, what shall we say 
of its admitted, its still more deprecated and in so 



MATILDE SERAO 299 

many quarters even deplored, effect upon the great 
body under the special patronage of which the "out- 
put" has none the less insisted on becoming incom- 
parably copious ? Since the general inaptitude of 
women appears by this time triumphantly to have 
been proved an assumption particularly hollow, de- 
spoiled more and more each day of the last tatters of 
its credit, why should not the new force thus liber- 
ated really, in the connection I indicate, give some- 
thing of its measure ? 

It is at any rate keeping within bounds to say that 
the novel will surely not become less free in propor- 
tion as the condition of women becomes more easy. 
It is more or less in deference to their constant con- 
cern with it that we have seen it, among ourselves, 
pick its steps so carefully; but there are indications 
that the future may reserve us the surprise of having 
to thank the very class whose supposed sensibilities 
have most oppressed us for teaching it not only a 
longer stride, but a healthy indifference to an occa- 
sional splash. It is for instance only of quite recent 
years that the type of fiction commonly identified as 
the "sexual" has achieved — for purposes of reference, 
so far as notices in newspapers may be held to consti- 
tute reference — a salience variously estimated. Now 
therefore, though it is early to say that all "imagina- 
tive work" from the female hand is subject to this 
description, there is assuredly none markedly so sub- 
ject that is not from the female hand. The female 
mind has in fact throughout the competition carried 
off the prize in the familiar game, known to us all 
from childhood's hour, of playing at "grown-up;" 
finding thus its opportunity, with no small acuteness, 



3 oo NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

in the more and more marked tendency of the mind 
of the other gender to revert, alike in the grave and 
the gay, to those simplicities which there would ap- 
pear to be some warrant for pronouncing puerile. It 
is the ladies in a word who have lately done most to 
remind us of man's relations with himself, that is with 
woman. His relations with the pistol, the pirate, the 
police, the wild and the tame beast — are not these 
prevailingly what the gentlemen have given us ? And 
does not the difference sufficiently point my moral ? 

Let me, however, not seem to have gone too far 
afield to seek it; for my reflections — general perhaps 
to excess — closely connect themselves with a subject 
to which they are quite ready to yield in interest. I 
have lately been giving a happy extension to an old 
acquaintance, dating from early in the eighties, with 
the striking romantic work of Matilde Serao; a writer 
who, apart from other successes, has the excellent ef- 
fect, the sign of the stronger few, that the end of her 
story is, for her reader, never the end of her work. 
On thus recently returning to her I have found in her 
something much more to my present purpose than the 
mere appearance of power and ease. If she is inter- 
esting largely because she is, in the light of her free, 
her extraordinary Neapolitan temperament, a vivid 
painter and a rich register of sensations and impres- 
sions, she is still more so as an exceptionally compact 
and suggestive case, a case exempt from interference 
and presenting itself with a beautiful unconsciousness. 
She has had the good fortune — if it be, after all, not 
the ill — to develop in an air in which convention, in 
our invidious sense, has had as little to say to her as 
possible; and she is accordingly a precious example of 



MATILDE SERAO 301 

the possibilities of free exercise. The questions of the 
proper and the improper are comfortably far from 
her; and though more than in the line of her sisters 
of English speech she may have to reckon with pre- 
scriptions as to form — a burden at which in truth she, 
snaps her fingers with an approach to impertinence— - 
she moves in a circle practically void of all pre-judg-. 
ment as to subject and matter. Conscious enough, 
doubtless, of a literary law to be offended, and caring 
little in fact, I repeat — for it is her weakness — what 
wrong it may suffer, she has not even the agreeable 
incentive of an ability to calculate the "moral" shocks 
she may administer. 

Practically chartered then she is further happy — 
since they both minister to ease — in two substantial 
facts: she is a daughter of the veritable south and a 
product of the contemporary newspaper. A Neapol- 
itan by birth and a journalist by circumstance, by 
marriage and in some degree doubtless also by incli- 
nation, she strikes for us from the first the note of 
facility and spontaneity and the note of initiation and 
practice. Concerned, through her husband, in the 
conduct of a Neapolitan morning paper, of a large cir- 
culation and a radical colour, she has, as I infer, pro- 
duced her novels and tales mainly in such snatches of 
time and of inspiration as have been left her by ur- 
gent day-to-day journalism. They distinctly betray, 
throughout, the conditions of their birth — so little are 
they to the literary sense children of maturity and 
leisure. On the question of style in a foreign writer 
it takes many contributive lights to make us sure of 
our ground; but I feel myself on the safe side in con- 
ceiving that this lady, full of perception and vibration, 



3 02 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

can not only not figure as a purist, but must be supposed 
throughout, in spite of an explosive eloquence, to pre- 
tend but little to distinction of form: which for an 
Italian is a much graver predicament than for one of 
our shapeless selves. That, however, would perhaps 
pass for a small quarrel with a writer, or rather with 
a talker and — for it is what one must most insist on — 
a feeler, of Matilde Serao's remarkable spontaneity. 
Her Neapolitan nature is by itself a value, to what- 
ever literary lapses it may minister. A torch kindled 
at that flame can be but freely waved, and our au- 
thor's arm has a fine action. Loud, loquacious, abun- 
dant, natural, happy, with luxurious insistences on the 
handsome, the costly and the fleshly, the fine persons 
and fine clothes of her characters, their satin and 
velvet, their bracelets, rings, white waistcoats, general 
appointments and bedroom furniture, with almost as 
many repetitions and as free a tongue, in short, as 
Juliet's nurse, she reflects at every turn the wonder- 
ful mixture that surrounds her — the beauty, the misery, 
the history, the light and noise and dust, the prolonged 
paganism and the renewed reactions, the great style of 
the distant and the past and the generally compro- 
mised state of the immediate and the near. These 
things were all in the germ for the reader of her ear- 
lier novels — they have since only gathered volume and 
assurance — so that I well remember the impression 
made on me, when the book was new (my copy, ap- 
parently of the first edition, bears the date of 1885), 
by the rare energy, the immense disinvoltura, of "La 
Conquista di Roma." This was my introduction to 
the author, in consequence of which I immediately 
read "Fantasia" and the "Vita e Avventure di Ric- 
cardo Joanna," with some smaller pieces; after which, 



MATILDE SERAO 303 

interrupted but not detached, I knew nothing more 
till, in the course of time, I renewed acquaintance on 
the ground of "II Paese di Cuccagna," then, however, 
no longer in its first freshness. That work set me 
straightway to reading everything else I could lay 
hands on, and I think therefore that, save "II Ventre 
di Napoli" and two or three quite recent productions 
that I have not met, there is nothing from our author 
that I have not mastered. Such as I find her in 
everything, she remains above all things the signal 
"case." 

If, however, she appears, as I am bound to note, 
not to have kept the full promise of her early energy, 
this is because it has suited her to move less in the di- 
rection — where so much might have awaited her — of 
"Riccardo Joanna" and "La Conquista" than in that, 
on the whole less happily symptomatic, of "Fantasia." 
"Fantasia" is, before all else, a study of "passion," 
or rather of the intenser form of that mystery which 
the Italian passione better expresses; and I hasten to 
confess that had she not so marked herself an expo- 
nent of this specialty I should probably not now be 
writing of her. I conceive none the less that it would 
have been open to her to favour more that side of her 
great talent of which the so powerful "Paese di Cuc- 
cagna" is the strongest example. There is by good 
fortune in this large miscellaneous picture of Neapoli- 
tan life no passione save that of the observer curiously 
and pityingly intent upon it, that of the artist resolute 
at any cost to embrace and reproduce it. Admirably, 
easily, convincingly objective, the thing is a sustained 
panorama, a chronicle of manners finding its unity in 
one recurrent note, that of the consuming lottery-hun- 



3 o 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

ger which constitutes the joy, the curse, the obsession 
and the ruin, according to Matilde Serao, of her fel- 
low-citizens. Her works are thus divided by a some- 
what unequal line, those on one side of which the 
critic is tempted to accuse her of having not altogether 
happily sacrificed to those on the other. When she 
for the most part invokes under the name of passione 
the main explanation of the mortal lot it is to follow 
the windings of this clue in the upper walks of life, 
to haunt the aristocracy, to embrace the world of 
fashion, to overflow with clothes, jewels and promis- 
cuous intercourse, all to the proportionate eclipse of 
her strong, full vision of the more usually vulgar. 
"La Conquista" is the story of a young deputy who 
comes up to the Chamber, from the Basilicata, with 
a touching candour of ambition and a perilous igno- 
rance of the pitfalls of capitals. His dream is to con- 
quer Rome, but it is by Rome naturally that he is 
conquered. He alights on his political twig with a 
flutter of wings, but has reckoned in his innocence 
without the strong taste in so many quarters for sport; 
and it is with a charge of shot in his breast and a 
drag of his pinions in the dust that he takes his way 
back to mediocrity, obscurity and the parent nest. 
It is from the ladies — as was indeed even from the 
first to be expected with Serao — that he receives his 
doom; passione is in these pages already at the door 
and soon arrives; passione rapidly enough passes its 
sponge over everything not itself. 

In "Cuore Infermo, ,, in "Addio Amore," in "II 
Castigo," in the two volumes of "Gli Amanti" and in 
various other pieces this efFacement is so complete that 
we see the persons concerned but in the one relation, 



MATILDE SERAO 305 

with every other circumstance, those of concurrent 
profession, possession, occupation, connection, inter- 
est, amusement, kinship, utterly superseded and ob- 
scured. Save in the three or four books I have 
named as exceptional the figures evoked are literally 
professional lovers, "available," as the term is, for 
passione alone: which is the striking sign, as I shall 
presently indicate, of the extremity in which her en- 
joyment of the freedom we so often have to envy has 
strangely landed our author. "Riccardo Joanna," 
which, like "La Conquista," has force, humour and 
charm, sounding with freshness the note of the gen- 
eral life, is such a picture of certain of the sordid con- 
ditions of Italian journalism as, if I may trust my 
memory without re-perusal, sharply and pathetically 
imposes itself. I recall "Fantasia" on the other hand 
as wholly passione — all concentration and erotics, the 
latter practised in this instance, as in "Addio Amore," 
with extreme cruelty to the "good" heroine, the per- 
son innocent and sacrificed; yet this volume too con- 
tributes its part in the retrospect to that appearance 
of marked discipleship which was one of the original 
sources of my interest. Nothing could more have en- 
gaged one's attention in these matters at that moment 
than the fresh phenomenon of a lady-novelist so con- 
fessedly flushed with the influence of Emile Zola. 
Passing among ourselves as a lurid warning even to 
workers of his own sex, he drew a new grace from the 
candid homage — all implied and indirect, but, as I re- 
figure my impression, not the less unmistakable — of 
that half of humanity which, let alone attempting to 
follow in his footsteps, was not supposed even to turn 
his pages. There is an episode in "Fantasia" — a 
scene in which the relations of the hero and the "bad" 



3 o6 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

heroine are strangely consolidated by a visit together 
to a cattle-show — in which the courage of the pupil 
has but little to envy the breadth of the master. The 
hot day and hot hour, the heavy air and the strong 
smells, the great and small beasts, the action on the 
sensibilities of the lady and the gentleman of the rich 
animal life, the collapse indeed of the lady in the pres- 
ence of the prize bull — all these are touches for which 
luckily our author has the warrant of a greater name. 
The general picture, in " Fantasia," of the agricultural 
exhibition at Caserta is in fact not the worse at any 
point for a noticeable echo of more than one French 
model. Would the author have found so full an oc- 
casion in it without a fond memory of the immortal 
Cornices of "Madame Bovary" ? 






These, however, are minor questions — pertinent only 
as connecting themselves with the more serious side 
of her talent. We may rejoice in such a specimen of 
it as is offered by the too brief series of episodes of 
"The Romance of the Maiden." These things, deal- 
ing mainly with the small miseries of small folk, have 
a palpable truth, and it is striking that, to put the 
matter simply, Madame Serao is at her best almost in 
direct proportion as her characters are poor. By poor 
I mean literally the reverse of rich; for directly they 
are rich and begin, as the phrase is, to keep their car- 
riage, her taste totters and lapses, her style approxi- 
mates at moments to that of the ladies who do the 
fashions and the letters from the watering-places in 
the society papers. She has acutely and she renders 
with excellent breadth the sense of benighted lives, of 
small sordid troubles, of the general unhappy youth- 
ful (on the part of her own sex at least) and the gen- 



MATILDE SERAO 307 

eral more or less starved plebeian consciousness. The 
degree to which it testifies to all this is one of the 
great beauties of "II Paese di Cuccagna, ,, even if the 
moral of that dire picture be simply that in respect 
to the gaming-passion, the madness of "numbers," no 
walk of life at Naples is too high or too low to be 
ravaged. Beautiful, in "II Romanzo della Fanciulla," 
are the exhibitions of grinding girl-life in the big tele- 
graph office and in the State normal school. The gem 
of "Gli Amanti" is the tiny tale of "Vicenzella," a 
masterpiece in twenty small pages — the vision of what 
three or four afternoon hours could contain for a slip 
of a creature of the Naples waterside, a poor girl who 
picks up a living by the cookery and sale, on the edge 
of a parapet, of various rank dismembered polyps of 
the southern sea, and who is from stage to stage de- 
spoiled of the pence she patiently pockets for them by 
the successive small emissaries of her artful, absent 
lover, constantly faithless, occupied, not too far off, 
in regaling a lady of his temporary preference, and 
proportionately clamorous for fresh remittances. The 
moment and the picture are but a scrap, yet they are 
as large as life. 

"Canituccia, ,, in "Piccole Anime," may happily pair 
with "Vicenzella," Canituccia being simply the hum- 
ble rustic guardian, in field and wood — scarce more 
than a child — of the still more tender Ciccotto; and 
Ciccotto being a fine young pink-and-white pig, an 
animal of endowments that lead, after he has had 
time to render infatuated his otherwise quite solitary 
and joyless friend, to his premature conversion into 
bacon. She assists, helplessly silent, staring, almost 
idiotic, from a corner of the cabin-yard, by night and 



308 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

lamplight, in the presence of gleaming knives and 
steaming pots and bloody tubs, at the sacrifice that 
deprives her of all company, and nothing can exceed the 
homely truth of the touch that finally rounds off 
the scene and for which I must refer my reader to 
the volume. Let me further not fail to register my 
admiration for the curious cluster of scenes that, in 
"II Romanzo," bears the title of "Nella Lava." Here 
frankly, I take it, we have the real principle of "nat- 
uralism" — a consistent presentment of the famous 
"slice of life." The slices given us — slices of shabby 
hungry maidenhood in small cockney circles — are but 
sketchily related to the volcanic catastrophe we hear 
rumbling behind them, the undertone of all the noise 
of Naples; but they have the real artistic importance 
of showing us how little "story" is required to hold 
us when we get, before the object evoked and in the 
air created, the impression of the real thing. What- 
ever thing — interesting inference — has but effectively 
to be real to constitute in itself story enough. There 
is no story without it, none that is not rank humbug; 
whereas with it the very desert blooms. 

This last-named phenomenon takes place, I fear, but 
in a minor degree in such of our author's productions 
as "Cuore Infermo," "Addio Amore," "II Castigo" 
and the double series of "Gli Amanti"; and for a 
reason that I the more promptly indicate as it not 
only explains, I think, the comparative inanity of 
these pictures, but does more than anything else to 
reward our inquiry. The very first reflection sug- 
gested by Serao's novels of "passion" is that they 
perfectly meet our speculation as to what might with 
a little time become of our own fiction were our par- 



MATILDE SERAO 309 

ticular convention suspended. We see so what, on its 
actual lines, does, what has, become of it, and are so 
sated with the vision that a little consideration of the 
latent other chance will surely but refresh us. The 
effect then, we discover, of the undertaking to give 
passione its whole place is that by the operation of a 
singular law no place speedily appears to be left for 
anything else; and the effect of that in turn is greatly 
to modify, first, the truth of things, and second, with 
small delay, what may be left them of their beauty. 
We find ourselves wondering after a little whether 
there may not really be more truth in the world mis- 
represented according to our own familiar fashion than 
in such a world as that of Madame Serao's exuberant 
victims of Venus. It is not only that if Venus herself 
is notoriously beautiful her altar, as happens, is by no 
means always proportionately august; it is also that 
we draw, in the long run, small comfort from the vir- 
tual suppression, by any painter, of whatever skill — 
and the skill of this particular one fails to rise to the 
height — of every relation in life but that over which 
Venus presides. In "Fior di Passione" and the sev- 
eral others of a like connection that I have named the 
suppression is really complete; the common humani- 
ties and sociabilities are wholly absent from the picture. 

The effect of this is extraordinarily to falsify the 
total show and to present the particular affair-^the 
intimacy in hand for the moment, though the mo- 
ment be but brief — as taking place in a strange false 
perspective, a denuded desert which experience surely 
fails ever to give us the like of and the action of which 
on the faculty of observation in the painter is any- 
thing but favourable. It strikes at the root, in the 



3 io NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

impression producible and produced, of discrimination 
and irony, of humour and pathos. Our present au- 
thor would doubtless contend on behalf of the works 
I have mentioned that pathos at least does abound in 
them — the particular bitterness, the inevitable despair 
that she again and again shows to be the final savour 
of the cup of passione. It would be quite open to her 
to urge — and she would be sure to do so with eloquence 
— that if we pusillanimously pant for a moral, no moral 
really can have the force of her almost inveterate 
evocation of the absolute ravage of Venus, the dry 
desolation that in nine cases out of ten Venus may be 
perceived to leave behind her. That, however, but 
half meets our argument — which bears by no means 
merely on the desolation behind, but on the desolation 
before, beside and generally roundabout. It is not in 
short at all the moral but the fable itself that in the ex- 
clusively sexual light breaks down and fails us. Love, 
at Naples and in Rome, as Madame Serao exhibits it, is 
simply unaccompanied with any interplay of our usual 
conditions — with affection, with duration, with circum- 
stances or consequences, with friends, enemies, hus- 
bands, wives, children, parents, interests, occupations, 
the manifestation of tastes. Who are these people, we 
presently ask ourselves, who love indeed with fury — 
though for the most part with astonishing brevity — 
but who are so without any suggested situation in life 
that they can only strike us as loving for nothing and 
in the void, to no gain of experience and no effect of 
a felt medium or a breathed air. We know them by 
nothing but their convulsions and spasms, and we feel 
once again that it is not the passion of hero and hero- 
ine that gives, that can ever give, the heroine and the 
hero interest, but that it is they themselves, with the 



MATILDE SERAO 311 

ground they stand on and the objects enclosing them, 
who give interest to their passion. This element 
touches us just in proportion as we see it mixed with 
other things, with all the things with which it has to 
reckon and struggle. There is moreover another re- 
flection with which the pathetic in this connection has 
to count, even though it undermine not a little the 
whole of the tragic effect of the agitations of passione. 
Is it, ruthlessly speaking, certain that the effect most 
consonant, for the spectator, with truth is half as 
tragic as it is something else ? Should not the moral 
be sought in the very different quarter where the muse 
of comedy rather would have the last word ? The 
ambiguity and the difficulty are, it strikes me, of a 
new growth, and spring from a perverse desire on the 
part of the erotic novelist to secure for the adventures 
he depicts a dignity that is not of the essence. To 
compass this dignity he has to cultivate the high pitch 
and beat the big drum, but when he has done so he 
has given everything the wrong accent and the whole 
the wrong extravagance. Why see it all, we ask him, 
as an extravagance of the solemn and the strained ? 
Why make such an erotic a matter of tears and im- 
precations, and by so doing render so poor a service 
both to pleasure and to pain ? Since by your own free 
showing it is pre-eminently a matter of folly, let us at 
least have folly with her bells, or when these must — 
since they must — sound knells and dirges, leave them 
only to the light hand of the lyric poet, who turns 
them at the worst to music. Matilde Serao is in this 
connection constantly lugubrious; even from the little 
so-called pastels of "Gli Amanti'* she manages, with 
an ingenuity worthy of a better cause, to expunge the 
note of gaiety. 



3 i2 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

This dismal parti pris indeed will inevitably, it is 
be feared, when all the emancipations shall have said 
their last word, be that of the ladies. Yet perhaps 
too, whatever such a probability, the tone scarce sig- 
nifies — in the presence, I mean, of the fundamental 
mistake from which the author before us warns us off. 
That mistake, we gather from her warning, would be 
to encourage, after all, any considerable lowering of 
the level of our precious fund of reserve. When we 
come to analyse we arrive at a final impression of what 
we pay, as lovers of the novel, for such a chartered 
state as we have here a glimpse of; and we find it to 
be an exposure, on the intervention at least of such a 
literary temperament as the one before us, to a new 
kind of vulgarity. We have surely as it is kinds 
enough. The absence of the convention throws the 
writer back on tact, taste, delicacy, discretion, sub- 
jecting these principles to a strain from which the 
happy office of its presence is, in a considerable degree 
and for performers of the mere usual endowment, to 
relieve him. When we have not a very fine sense the 
convention appears in a manner to have it on our be- 
half. And how frequent to-day, in the hurrying herd 
of brothers and sisters of the pen, is a fine sense — of 
any side of their affair ? Do we not approach the 
truth in divining that only an eminent individual here 
and there may be trusted for it ? Here — for the case 
is our very lesson — is this robust and wonderful Serao 
who is yet not to be trusted at all. Does not the dim 
religious light with which we surround its shrine do 
more, on the whole, for the poetry of passione than the 
flood of flaring gas with which, in her pages, and at 
her touch, it is drenched ? Does it not shrink, as a 
subject under treatment, from such expert recogni- 






MATILDE SERAO 313 

tions and easy discussions, from its so pitiless reduc- 
tion to the category of the familiar ? It issues from the 
ordeal with the aspect with which it might escape 
from a noisy family party or alight from a crowded 
omnibus. It is at the category of the familiar that vul- 
garity begins. There may be a cool virtue therefore 
even for "art," and an appreciable distinction even for 
truth, in the grace of hanging back and the choice of 
standing off, in that shade of the superficial which we 
best defend by simply practising it in season. A feel- 
ing revives at last, after a timed intermission, that we 
may not immediately be quite able, quite assured 
enough, to name, but which, gradually clearing up, 
soon defines itself almost as a yearning. We turn 
round in obedience to it — unmistakably we turn round 
again to the opposite pole, and there before we know it 
have positively laid a clinging hand on dear old Jane 
Austen. 



THE NEW NOVEL 
1914 

We feel it not to be the ( paradox it may at the first 
blush seem that the state of the novel in England at 
the present time is virtually very much the state of 
criticism itself; and this moreover, at the risk perhaps 
of some added appearance of perverse remark, by the 
very reason that we see criticism so much in abeyance. 
So far as we miss it altogether how and why does its 
"state" matter, and why and how can it or should 
it, as an absent force, enjoy a relation to that constant 
renewal of our supply of fiction which is a present one 
so far as a force at all ? The relation is this, in the 
fewest words: that no equal outpouring of matter into 
the mould of literature, or what roughly passes for 
such, has been noted to live its life and maintain its 
flood, its level at least of quantity and mass, in such 
free and easy independence of critical attention. It 
constitutes a condition and a perversity on the part of 
this element to remain irresponsive before an appeal 
so vociferous at least and so incessant; therefore how 
can such a neglect of occasions, so careless a habit in 
spite of marked openings, be better described than as 
responsibility declined in the face of disorder ? The 
disorder thus determines the relation, from the moment 
we feel that it might be less, that it might be different, 
that something in the way of an order even might be 
disengaged from it and replace it; from the moment in 
fact that the low critical pitch is logically reflected in 

314 



THE NEW NOVEL 315 

the poetic or, less pedantically speaking, the improv- 
isational at large. The effect, if not the prime office, 
of criticism is to make our absorption and our enjoy- 
ment of the things that feed the mind as aware of itself 
as possible, since that awareness quickens the mental 
demand, which thus in turn wanders further and fur- 
ther for pasture. This action on the part of the mind 
practically amounts to a reaching out for the reasons 
of its interest, as only by its so ascertaining them can 
the interest grow more various. This is the very 
education of our imaginative life; and thanks to it the 
general question of how to refine, and of why certain 
things refine more and most, on that happy conscious- 
ness, becomes for us of the last importance. Then 
we cease to be only instinctive and at the mercy v of 
chance, feeling that we can ourselves take a hand in 
our satisfaction and provide for it, making ourselves 
safe against dearth, and through the door opened by 
that perception criticism enters, if we but give it time, 
as a flood, the great flood of awareness; so maintaining 
its high tide unless through some lapse of our sense 
for it, some flat reversion to instinct alone, we block up 
the ingress and sit in stale and shrinking waters. 
Stupidity may arrest any current and fatuity transcend 
any privilege. The comfort of those who at such a 
time consider the scene may be a little, with their 
curiosity still insistent, to survey its platitude and 
record the exhibited shrinkage; which amounts to the 
attempt to understand how stupidity could so have 
prevailed. We take it here that the answer to that 
inquiry can but be ever the same. The flood of "pro- 
duction" has so inordinately exceeded the activity of 
control that this latter anxious agent, first alarmed but 
then indifferent, has been forced backward out of the 



316 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

gate, leaving the contents of the reservoir to boil and 
evaporate. It is verily on the wrong side of the gate 
that we just now seem to see criticism stand, for never 
was the reservoir so bubblingly and noisily full, at 
least by the superficial measure of life. We have 
caught the odd accident in the very fact of its occur- 
rence; we have seen the torrent swell by extravagant 
cheap contribution, the huge increase of affluents 
turbid and unstrained. Beyond number are the ways 
in which the democratic example, once gathering mo- 
mentum, sets its mark on societies and seasons that 
stand in its course. Nowhere is that example written 
larger, to our perception, than in "the new novel"; 
though this, we hasten to add, not in the least because 
prose fiction now occupies itself as never before with 
the " condition of the people," a fact quite irrelevant 
to the nature it has taken on, but because that nature 
amounts exactly to the complacent declaration of a 
common literary level, a repudiation the most opera- 
tive even if the least reasoned of the idea of differences, 
the virtual law, as we may call it, of sorts and kinds, 
the values of individual quality and weight in the pres- 
ence of undiscriminated quantity and rough-and-tum- 
ble "output" — these attestations made, we naturally 
mean, in the air of composition and on the esthetic 
plane, if such terms have still an attenuated reference 
to the case before us. With which, if we be asked, in 
the light of that generalisation, whether we impute to 
the novel, or in other words the novelist, all the stu- 
pidity against which the spirit of appreciation spends 
itself in vain, we reply perforce that we stop short of 
that, it being too obvious that of an exhibition so ster- 
ilised, so void of all force and suggestion, there would 
be nothing whatever to say. Our contention is exactly 



THE NEW NOVEL 317 

that, in spite of all vain aspects, it does yet present 
an interest, and that here and there seem written on it 
likelihoods of its presenting still more — always on con- 
dition of its consenting to that more intimate educa- 
tion which is precisely what democratised movements 
look most askance at. It strikes us as not too much to 
say that our actual view of the practice of fiction gives 
as just a measure as could be desired of the general, 
the incurable democratic suspicion of the selective and 
comparative principles in almost any application, and 
the tendency therewith to regard, and above all to 
treat, one manner of book, like one manner of person, 
as, if not absolutely as good as another, yet good 
enough for any democratic use. Criticism reflects con- 
tentiously on that appearance, though it be an appear- 
ance in which comfort for the book and the manner 
much resides; so that the idea prompting these re- 
marks of our own is that the comfort may be deeply 
fallacious. 



Still not to let go of our imputation of interest to 
some part at least of what is happening in the world 
of production in this kind, we may say that non- 
selective and non-comparative practice appears bent 
on showing us all it can do and how far or to what 
appointed shores, what waiting havens and inviting 
inlets, the current that is mainly made a current by 
looseness, by want of observable direction, shall suc- 
ceed in carrying it. We respond to any sign of an in- 
telligent view or even of a lively instinct — which is 
why we give the appearance so noted the benefit of 
every presumption as to its life and health. It may 
be that the dim sense is livelier than the presentable 



318 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

reason, but even that is no graceless fact for us, espe- 
cially when the keenness of young curiosity and energy 
is betrayed in its pace, and betrayed, for that matter, 
in no small abundance and variety. The new or at 
least the young novel is up and doing, clearly, with the 
best faith and the highest spirits in the world; if we 
but extend a little our measure of youth indeed, as we 
are happily more and more disposed to, we may speak 
of it as already chin-deep in trophies. The men who 
are not so young as the youngest were but the other 
day very little older than these: Mr. Joseph Conrad, 
Mr. Maurice Hewlett and Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. 
Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett, have not quite perhaps 
the early bloom of Mr. Hugh Walpole, Mr. Gilbert 
Cannan, Mr. Compton Mackenzie and Mr. D. H. 
Lawrence, but the spring unrelaxed is still, to our per-* 
ception, in their step, and we see two or three of them 
sufficiently related to the still newer generation in a 
quasi-parental way to make our whole enumeration 
as illustrational as we need it. Mr. Wells and Mr. 
Arnold Bennett have their strongest mark, the aspect 
by which we may most classify them, in common — 
even if their three named contemporaries are doubtless 
most interesting in one of the connections we are not 
now seeking to make. The author of "Tono-Bungay" 
and of "The New Machiavelli, ,, and the author of 
"The Old Wives' Tale" and of "Clayhanger," have 
practically launched the boat in which we admire the 
fresh play of oar of the author of "The Duchess of 
Wrexe," and the documented aspect exhibited suc- 
cessively by "Round the Corner,"" by "Carnival" and 
"Sinister Street," and even by "Sons and Lovers" 
(however much we may find Mr. Lawrence, we con- 
fess, hang in the dusty rear). We shall explain in a 



THE NEW NOVEL 319 

moment what we mean by this designation of the ele- 
ment that these best of the younger men strike us as 
more particularly sharing, our point being provision- 
ally that Mr. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett (speaking 
now only of them) began some time back to show us, 
and to show sundry emulous and generous young 
spirits then in the act of more or less waking up, what 
the state in question might amount to. We confound 
the author of "Tono-Bungay" and the author of 
"Clayhanger" in this imputation for the simple reason 
that with the sharpest differences of character and 
range they yet come together under our so convenient 
measure of value by saturation. This is the greatest 
value, to our sense, in either of them, their other 
values, even when at the highest, not being quite in 
proportion to it; and as to be saturated is to be docu- 
mented, to be able even on occasion to prove quite 
enviably and potently so, they are alike in the authority 
that creates emulation. It little signifies that Mr. 
Wells's documented or saturated state in respect to a 
particular matter in hand is but one of the faces of his 
generally informed condition, of his extraordinary mass 
of gathered and assimilated knowledge, a miscella- 
neous collection more remarkable surely than any teller 
of "mere" tales, with the possible exception of Balzac, 
has been able to draw upon, whereas Mr. Arnold 
Bennett's corresponding provision affects us as, though 
singularly copious, special, exclusive and artfully 
economic. This distinction avails nothing against 
that happy fact of the handiest possession by Mr. 
Wells of immeasurably more concrete material, ame- 
nable for straight and vivid reference, convertible into 
apt illustration, than we should know where to look 
for other examples of. The author of "The New 



3 2o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Machiavelli " knows, somehow, to our mystified and 
dazzled apprehension, because he writes and because 
that act constitutes for him the need, on occasion a 
most desperate, of absorbing knowledge at the pores; 
the chronicler of the Five Towns writing so much more 
discernibly, on the other hand, because he knows, and 
conscious of no need more desperate than that par- 
ticular circle of civilisation may satisfy. 

Our argument is that each is ideally immersed in 
his own body of reference, and that immersion in any 
such degree and to the effect of any such variety, in- 
tensity and plausibility is really among us a new fea- 
ture of the novelist's range of resource. We have seen 
him, we have even seen her, otherwise auspiciously en- 
dowed, seen him observant, impassioned, inspired, and 
in virtue of these things often very charming, very 
interesting, very triumphant, visibly qualified for the 
highest distinction before the fact and visibly crowned 
by the same after it — we have seen him with a great 
imagination and a great sense of life, we have seen him 
even with a great sense of expression and a considerable 
sense of art : so that we have only to reascend the stream 
of our comparatively recent literature to meet him 
serene and immortal, brow-bound with the bay and 
erect on his particular pedestal; We have only to 
do that, but have only also, while we do it, to recog- 
nise that meantime other things still than these various 
apotheoses have taken place, and that, to the increase 
of our recreation, and even if our limited space con- 
demns us to put the matter a trifle clumsily, a change 
has come over our general receptive sensibility not 
less than over our productive tradition. In these con- 
nections, we admit, overstatement is easy and over- 



THE NEW NOVEL 321 

emphasis tempting; we confess furthermore to a 
frank desire to enrich the case, the historic, with all 
the meaning we can stuff into it. So viewed accord- 
ingly it gives us the "new," to repeat our expression, 
as an appetite for a closer notation, a sharper spec- 
ification of the signs of life, of consciousness, of the 
human scene and the human subject in general, than 
the three or four generations before us had been at all 
moved to insist on. They had insisted indeed, these 
generations, we see as we look back to them, on almost 
nothing whatever; what was to come to them had 
come, in enormous affluence and freshness at its best, 
and to our continued appreciation as well as to the 
honour of their sweet susceptibility, because again and 
again the great miracle of genius took place, while they 
gaped, in their social and sentimental sky. For our- 
selves that miracle has not been markedly renewed, 
but it has none the less happened that by hook and by 
crook the case for appreciation remains interesting. 
The great thing that saves it, under the drawback we 
have named, is, no doubt, that we have simply — always 
for appreciation — learned a little to insist, and that we 
thus get back on one hand something of what we have 
lost on the other. We are unable of course, with 
whatever habit of presumption engendered, to insist 
upon genius; so that who shall describe the measure 
of success we still achieve as not virtually the search 
for freshness, and above all for closeness, in quite a 
different direction ? To this nearer view of commoner 
things Mr. Wells, say, and Mr. Arnold Bennett, and 
in their degree, under the infection communicated, 
Mr. D. H. Lawrence and Mr. Gilbert Cannan and Mr. 
Compton Mackenzie and Mr. Hugh Walpole, strike 
us as having all gathered themselves up with a move- 



322 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

ment never yet undertaken on our literary scene, and, 
beyond anything else, with an instinctive divination 
of what had most waved their predecessors off it. 
What had this lion in the path been, we make them 
out as after a fashion asking themselves, what had it 
been from far back and straight down through all the 
Victorian time, but the fond superstition that the key 
of the situation, of each and every situation that could 
turn up for the novelist, was the sentimental key, which 
might fit into no door or window opening on closeness 
or on freshness at all ? Was it not for all the world 
as if even the brightest practitioners of the past, those 
we now distinguish as saved for glory in spite of them- 
selves, had been as sentimental as they could, or, to 
give the trick another name, as romantic and thereby 
as shamelessly "dodgy" ? — just in order not to be close 
and fresh, not to be authentic, as that takes trouble, 
takes talent, and you can be sentimental, you can be 
romantic, you can be dodgy, alas, not a bit less on the 
footing of genius than on the footing of mediocrity or 
even of imbecility ? Was it not as if the sentimental 
had been more and more noted as but another name 
for the romantic, if not indeed the romantic as but 
another name for the sentimental, and as if these 
things, whether separate or united, had been in the 
same degree recognised as unamenable, or at any rate 
unfavourable, to any consistent fineness of notation, 
once the tide of the copious as a condition of the 
thorough had fairly set in ? 

So, to express it briefly, the possibility of hugging 
the shore of the real as it had not, among us, been 
hugged, and of pushing inland, as far as a keel might 
float, wherever the least opening seemed to smile, 



THE NEW NOVEL 323 

dawned upon a few votaries and gathered further con- 
fidence with exercise. Who could say, of course, that 
Jane Austen had not been close, just as who could ask 
if Anthony Trollope had not been copious ? — just as 
who could not say that it all depended on what was 
meant by these terms ? The demonstration of what 
was meant, it presently appeared, could come but 
little by little, quite as if each tentative adventurer 
had rather anxiously to learn for himself what might 
be meant — this failing at least the leap into the arena 
of some great demonstrative, some sudden athletic 
and epoch-making authority. Who could pretend that 
Dickens was anything but romantic, and even more 
romantic in his humour, if possible, than in pathos or 
in queer perfunctory practice of the "plot" ? Who 
could pretend that Jane Austen didn't leave much 
more untold than told about the aspects and manners 
even of the confined circle in which her muse revolved ? 
Why shouldn't it be argued against her that where her 
testimony complacently ends the pressure of appetite 
within us presumes exactly to begin ? Who could 
pretend that the reality of Trollope didn't owe much 
of its abundance to the diluted, the quite extrav- 
agantly watered strain, no less than to the heavy hand, 
in which it continued to be ladled out ? Who of the 
younger persuasion would not have been ready to cite, 
as one of the liveliest opportunities for the critic eager 
to see representation searching, such a claim for the 
close as Thackeray's sighing and protesting "look-in" 
at the acquaintance between Arthur Pendennis and 
Fanny Bolton, the daughter of the Temple laundress, 
amid the purlieus of that settlement ? The sentimen- 
tal habit and the spirit of romance, it was unmistakably 
chargeable, stood out to sea as far as possible the 



3 2 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

moment the shore appeared to offer the least difficulty 
to hugging, and the Victorian age bristled with perfect 
occasions for our catching them in the act of this 
showy retreat. All revolutions have been prepared in 
spite of their often striking us as sudden, and so it was 
doubtless that when scarce longer ago than the other 
day Mr. Arnold Bennett had the fortune to lay his 
hand on a general scene and a cluster of agents deficient 
to a peculiar degree in properties that might interfere 
with a desirable density of illustration — deficient, that 
is, in such connections as might carry the imagination 
off to some sport on its own account — we recognised 
at once a set of conditions auspicious to the newer kind 
of appeal. Let us confess that we were at the same 
time doubtless to master no better way of describing 
these conditions than by the remark that they were, 
for some reason beautifully inherent in them, suscep- 
tible at once of being entirely known and of seeming 
delectably thick. Reduction to exploitable knowl- 
edge is apt to mean for many a case of the human com- 
plexity reduction to comparative thinness; and noth- 
ing was thereby at the first blush to interest us more 
than the fact that the air and the very smell of packed 
actuality in the subject-matter of such things as the 
author's two longest works was clearly but another 
name for his personal competence in that matter, the 
fulness and firmness of his embrace of it. This was a 
fresh and beguiling impression — that the state of inor- 
dinate possession on the chronicler's part, the mere 
state as such and as an energy directly displayed, was 
the interest, neither more nor less, was the sense and the 
meaning and the picture and the drama, all so suf- 
ficiently constituting them that it scarce mattered what 
they were in themselves. Of what they were in them- 



THE NEW NOVEL 325 

selves their being in Mr. Bennett, as Mr. Bennett to 
such a tune harboured them, represented their one 
conceivable account — not to mention, as reinforcing 
this, our own great comfort and relief when certain 
high questions and wonderments about them, or about 
our mystified relation to them, began one after an- 
other to come up. 

Because such questions did come, we must at once 
declare, and we are still in presence of them, for all 
the world as if that case of the perfect harmony, the 
harmony between subject and author, were just marked 
with a flaw and didn't meet the whole assault of rest- 
less criticism. What we make out Mr. Bennett as 
doing is simply recording his possession or, to put it 
more completely, his saturation; and to see him as 
virtually shut up to that process is a note of all the 
more moment that we see our selected cluster of his 
interesting juniors, and whether by his direct action 
on their collective impulse or not, embroiled, as we 
venture to call it, in the same predicament. The act 
of squeezing out to the utmost the plump and more or 
less juicy orange of a particular acquainted state and 
letting this affirmation of energy, however directed or 
undirected, constitute for them the " treatment" of a 
theme — that is what we remark them as mainly en- 
gaged in, after remarking the example so strikingly, so 
originally set, even if an undue subjection to it be here 
and there repudiated. Nothing is further from our 
thought than to undervalue saturation and possession, 
the fact of the particular experience, the state and 
degree of acquaintance incurred, however such a con- 
sciousness may have been determined; for these things 
represent on the part of the novelist, as on the part of 



326 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

any painter of things seen, felt or imagined, just one 
half of his authority — the other half being represented 
of course by the application he is inspired to make of 
them. Therefore that fine secured half is so much 
gained at the start, and the fact of its brightly being 
there may really by itself project upon the course so 
much colour and form as to make us on occasion, under 
the genial force, almost not miss the answer to the 
question of application. When the author of " Clay- 
hanger " has put down upon the table, in dense un- 
confused array, every fact required, every fact in any 
way invocable, to make the life of the Five Towns 
press upon us, and to make our sense of it, so full-fed, 
content us, we may very well go on for the time in the 
captive condition, the beguiled and bemused condi- 
tion, the acknowledgment of which is in general our 
highest tribute to the temporary master of our sen- 
sibility. Nothing at such moments — or rather at the 
end of them, when the end begins to threaten — may 
be of a more curious strain than the dawning unrest 
that suggests to us fairly our first critical comment: 
"Yes, yes — but is this all? These are the circum- 
stances of the interest — we see, we see; but where 
is the interest itself, where and what is its centre, 
and how are we to measure it in relation to that?" 
Of course we may in the act of exhaling that plaint 
(which we have just expressed at its mildest) well 
remember how many people there are to tell us that 
to "measure" an interest is none of our affair; that 
we have but to take it on the cheapest and easiest 
terms and be thankful; and that if by our very con- 
fession we have been led the imaginative dance the 
music has done for us all it pretends to. Which words, 
however, have only to happen to be for us the most 



THE NEW NOVEL 327 

unintelligent conceivable not in the least to arrest our 
wonderment as to where our bedrenched consciousness 
may still not awkwardly leave us for the pleasure of 
appreciation. That appreciation is also a mistake 
and a priggishness, being reflective and thereby corro- 
sive, is another of the fond dicta which we are here 
concerned but to brush aside — the more closely to 
embrace the welcome induction that appreciation, at- 
tentive and reflective, inquisitive and conclusive, is 
in this connection absolutely the golden key to our 
pleasure. The more it plays up, the more we recognise 
and are able to number the sources of our enjoyment, 
the greater the provision made for security in that 
attitude, which corresponds, by the same stroke, with 
the reduced danger of waste in the undertaking to 
amuse us. It all comes back to our amusement, and 
to the noblest surely, on the whole, we know; and it 
is in the very nature of clinging appreciation not to 
sacrifice consentingly a single shade of the art that 
makes for that blessing. From this solicitude spring 
our questions, and not least the one to which we give 
ourselves for the moment here — this moment of our 
being regaled as never yet with the fruits of the move- 
ment (if the name be not of too pompous an applica- 
tion where the flush and the heat of accident too seem 
so candidly to look forth), in favour of the "expression 
of life" in terms as loose as may pretend to an effect 
of expression at all. The relegation of terms to the 
limbo of delusions outlived so far as ever really cul- 
tivated becomes of necessity, it will be plain, the great 
mark of the faith that for the novelist to show he 
"knows all about" a certain congeries of aspects, the 
more numerous within their mixed circle the better, 
is thereby to set in motion, with due intensity, the pre- 



328 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

tension to interest. The state of knowing all about 
whatever it may be has thus only to become con- 
sistently and abundantly active to pass for his supreme 
function; and to its so becoming active few difficulties 
appear to be descried — so great may on occasion be 
the mere excitement of activity. To the fact that the 
exhilaration is, as we have hinted, often infectious, to 
this and to the charming young good faith and general 
acclamation under which each case appears to proceed 
— each case we of course mean really repaying atten- 
tion — the critical reader owes his opportunity so con- 
siderably and so gratefully to generalise. 

II 

We should have only to remount the current with a 
certain energy to come straight up against Tolstoy 
as the great illustrative master-hand on all this ground 
of the disconnection of method from matter — which 
encounter, however, would take us much too far, so 
that we must for the present but hang off from it with 
the remark that of all great painters of the social pic- 
ture it was given that epic genius most to serve admi- 
rably as a rash adventurer and a "caution," and ex- 
ecrably, pestilentially, as a model. In this strange 
union of relations he stands alone: from no other great 
projector of the human image and the human idea is 
so much truth to be extracted under an equal leakage 
of its value. All the proportions in him are so much 
the largest that the drop of attention to our nearer 
cases might by its violence leave little of that principle 
alive; which fact need not disguise from us, none the 
less, that as Mr. H. G. Wells and Mr. Arnold Bennett, 
to return to them briefly again, derive, by multiplied if 



THE NEW NOVEL 329 

diluted transmissions, from the great Russian (from 
whose all but equal companion Turgenieff we recog- 
nise no derivatives at all), so, observing the distances, 
we may profitably detect an unexhausted influence in 
our minor, our still considerably less rounded vessels. 
Highly attaching as indeed the game might be, of in- 
quiring as to the centre of the interest or the sense of 
the whole in "The Passionate Friends," or in "The 
Old Wives' Tale," after having sought those luxuries 
in vain not only through the general length and breadth 
of "War and Peace," but within the quite respectable 
confines of any one of the units of effect there clustered : 
this as preparing us to address a like friendly challenge 
to Mr. Cannan's "Round the Corner," say, or to Mr. 
Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" — should we wish to be 
very friendly to Mr. Lawrence — or to Mr. Hugh Wal- 
pole's "Duchess of Wrexe," or even to Mr. Compton 
Mackenzie's "Sinister Street" and "Carnival," dis- 
cernibly, we hasten to add, though certain betrayals 
of a controlling idea and a pointed intention do com- 
paratively gleam out of the two fictions last named. 
"The Old Wives' Tale" is the history of two sisters, 
daughters of a prosperous draper in a Staffordshire 
town, who, separating early in life, through the flight 
of one of them to Paris with an ill-chosen husband and 
the confirmed and prolonged local pitch of the career 
of the other, are reunited late in life by the return of 
the fugitive after much Parisian experience and by her 
pacified acceptance of the conditions of her birthplace. 
The divided current flows together again, and the 
chronicle closes with the simple drying up determined 
by the death of the sisters. That is all; the canvas is 
covered, ever so closely and vividly covered, by the 
exhibition of innumerable small facts and aspects, at 



33 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

which we assist with the most comfortable sense of 
their substantial truth. The sisters, and more par- 
ticularly the less adventurous, are at home in their 
author's mind, they sit and move at their ease in the 
square chamber of his attention, to a degree beyond 
which the production of that ideal harmony between 
creature and creator could scarcely go, and all by an 
art of demonstration so familiar and so "quiet" that 
the truth and the poetry, to use Goethe's distinction, 
melt utterly together and we see no difference between 
the subject of the show and the showman's feeling, 
let alone the showman's manner, about it. This felt 
identity of the elements — because we at least con- 
sciously feel — becomes in the novel we refer to, and not 
less in "Clayhanger," which our words equally de- 
scribe, a source for us of abject confidence, confidence 
truly so abject in the solidity of every appearance 
that it may be said to represent our whole relation 
to the work and completely to exhaust our reaction 
upon it. "Clayhanger," of the two fictions even the 
more densely loaded with all the evidence in what we 
should call the case presented did we but learn mean- 
while for what case, or for a case of what, to take it, 
inscribes the annals, the private more particularly, 
of a provincial printer in a considerable way of bus- 
iness, beginning with his early boyhood and going on 
to the complications of his maturity — these not ex- 
hausted with our present possession of the record, 
inasmuch as by the author's announcement there is 
more of the catalogue to come. This most monumen- 
tal of Mr. Arnold Bennett's recitals, taking it with its 
supplement of "Hilda Lessways," already before us, 
is so describable through its being a monument exactly 
not to an idea, a pursued and captured meaning, or in 



THE NEW NOVEL 331 

short to anything whatever, but just simply of the 
quarried and gathered material it happens to contain, 
the stones and bricks and rubble and cement and pro- 
miscuous constituents of every sort that have been 
heaped in it and thanks to which it quite massively 
piles itself up. Our perusal and our enjoyment are 
our watching of the growth of the pile and of the 
capacity, industry, energy with which the operation is 
directed. A huge and in its way a varied aggregation, 
without traceable lines, divinable direction, effect of 
composition, the mere number of its pieces, the great 
dump of its material, together with the fact that here 
and there in the miscellany, as with the value of bits 
of marble or porphyry, fine elements shine out, it 
keeps us standing and waiting to the end — and largely 
just because it keeps us wondering. We surely wonder 
more what it may all propose to mean than any equal 
appearance of preparation to relieve us of that strain, 
any so founded and grounded a postponement of the 
disclosure of a sense in store, has for a long time called 
upon us to do in a like connection. A great thing it is 
assuredly that while we wait and wonder we are amused 
— were it not for that, truly, our situation would be 
thankless enough; we may ask ourselves, as has 
already been noted, why on such ambiguous terms we 
should consent to be, and why the practice doesn't at 
a given moment break down; and our answer brings 
us back to that many-fingered grasp of the orange that 
the author squeezes. This particular orange is of the 
largest and most rotund, and his trust in the consequent 
flow is of its nature communicative. Such is the case 
always, and most naturally, with that air in a person 
who has something, who at the very least has much to 
tell us: we like so to be affected by it, we meet it half 



332 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

way and lend ourselves, sinking in up to the chin. 
Up to the chin only indeed, beyond doubt; we even 
then feel our head emerge, for judgment and articulate 
question, and it is from that position that we remind 
ourselves how the real reward of our patience is still 
to come — the reward attending not at all the imme- 
diate sense of immersion, but reserved for the after- 
sense, which is a very different matter, whether in 
the form of a glow or of a chill. 

If Mr. Bennett's tight rotundity then is of the hand- 
somest size and his manipulation of it so firm, what are 
we to say of Mr. Wells's, who, a novelist very much 
as Lord Bacon was a philosopher, affects us as taking 
all knowledge for his province and as inspiring in us 
to the very highest degree the confidence enjoyed by 
himself — enjoyed, we feel, with a breadth with which 
it has been given no one of his fellow-craftsmen to 
enjoy anything. If confidence alone could lead utterly 
captive we should all be huddled in a bunch at Mr. 
Wells's heels — which is indeed where we are abjectly 
gathered so far as that force does operate. It is lit- 
erally Mr. Wells's own mind, and the experience of his 
own mind, incessant and extraordinarily various, ex- 
traordinarily reflective, even with all sorts of condi- 
tions made, of whatever he may expose it to, that forms 
the reservoir tapped by him, that constitutes his pro- 
vision of grounds of interest. It is, by our thinking, 
in his power to name to us, as a preliminary, more of 
these grounds than all his contemporaries put together, 
and even to exceed any competitor, without exception, 
in the way of suggesting that, thick as he may seem 
to lay them, they remain yet only contributive, are 
not in themselves full expression but are designed 



THE NEW NOVEL 333 

strictly to subserve it, that this extraordinary writer's 
spell resides. When full expression, the expression of 
some particular truth, seemed to lapse in this or that 
of his earlier novels (we speak not here of his shorter 
things, for the most part delightfully wanton and ex- 
empt,) it was but by a hand's breadth, so that if we 
didn't inveterately quite know what he intended we 
yet always felt sufficiently that he knew. The par- 
ticular intentions of such matters as "Kipps," as 
"Tono-Bungay," as "Ann Veronica," so swarmed 
about us, in their blinding, bluffing vivacity, that the 
mere sum of them might have been taken for a sense 
over and above which it was graceless to inquire. The 
more this author learns and learns, or at any rate knows 
and knows, however, the greater is this impression of 
his holding it good enough for us, such as we are, that 
he shall but turn out his mind and its contents upon us 
by any free familiar gesture and as from a high window 
forever open — an entertainment as copious surely as 
any occasion should demand, at least till we have more 
intelligibly expressed our title to a better. Such things 
as "The New Machiavelli," "Marriage," "The Pas- 
sionate Friends," are so very much more attestations 
of the presence of material than attestations of an 
interest in the use of it that we ask ourselves again 
and again why so fondly neglected a state of leakage 
comes not to be fatal to any provision of quantity, 
or even to stores more specially selected for the ordeal 
than Mr. Wells's always strike us as being. Is not 
the pang of witnessed waste in fact great just in pro- 
portion as we are touched by our author's fine ofT- 
handedness as to the value of the stores, about which 
he can for the time make us believe what he will ? so 
that, to take an example susceptible of brief statement, 



334 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

we wince at a certain quite peculiarly gratuitous sac- 
rifice to the casual in "Marriage" very much as at 
seeing some fine and indispensable little part of a 
mechanism slip through profane fingers and lose it- 
self. Who does not remember what ensues after a 
little upon the aviational descent of the hero of the 
fiction just named into the garden occupied, in com- 
pany with her parents, by the young lady with whom 
he is to fall in love ? — and this even though the whole 
opening scene so constituted, with all the comedy hares 
its function appears to be to start, remains with its 
back squarely turned, esthetically speaking, to the 
quarter in which the picture develops. The point for 
our mortification is that by one of the first steps in this 
development, the first impression on him having been 
made, the hero accidentally meets the heroine, of a 
summer eventide, in a leafy lane which supplies them 
with the happiest occasion to pursue their acquaintance 
— or in other words supplies the author with the 
liveliest consciousness (as we at least feel it should have 
been) that just so the relation between the pair, its 
seed already sown and the fact of that bringing about 
all that is still to come, pushes aside whatever veil and 
steps forth into life. To show it step forth and affirm 
itself as a relation, what is this but the interesting 
function of the whole passage, on the performance of 
which what follows is to hang ? — and yet who can say 
that when the ostensible sequence is presented, and 
our young lady, encountered again by her stirred 
swain, under cover of night, in a favouring wood, is at 
once encompassed by his arms and pressed to his lips 
and heart (for celebration thus of their third meeting) we 
do not assist at a well-nigh heartbreaking miscarriage 
of "effect" ? We see effect, invoked in vain, simply 



THE NEW NOVEL 335 

stand off unconcerned; effect not having been at all 
consulted in advance she is not to be secured on such 
terms. And her presence would so have redounded 
— perfectly punctual creature as she is on a made ap- 
pointment and a clear understanding — to the advan- 
tage of all concerned. The bearing of the young man's 
act is all in our having begun to conceive it as possible, 
begun even to desire it, in the light of what has pre- 
ceded; therefore if the participants have not been 
shown us as on the way to it, nor the question of it 
made beautifully to tremble for us in the air, its hap- 
piest connections fail and we but stare at it mystified. 
The instance is undoubtedly trifling, but in the in- 
finite complex of such things resides for a work of 
art the shy virtue, shy at least till wooed forth, of 
the whole susceptibility. The case of Mr. Wells might 
take us much further — such remarks as there would 
be to make, say, on such a question as the due under- 
standing, on the part of "The Passionate Friends" 
(not as associated persons but as a composed picture), 
of what that composition is specifically about and 
where, for treatment of this interest, it undertakes to 
find its centre: all of which, we are willing however 
to grant, falls away before the large assurance and in- 
corrigible levity with which this adventurer carries 
his lapses — far more of an adventurer as he is than any 
other of the company. The composition, as we have 
called it, heaven saving the mark, is simply at any and 
every moment "about" Mr. Wells's general adventure; 
which is quite enough while it preserves, as we trust 
it will long continue to do, its present robust pitch. 

We have already noted that "Round the Corner," 
Mr. Gilbert Cannan's liveliest appeal to our attention, 



336 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

belongs to the order of constatations pure and simple; 
to the degree that as a document of that nature and 
of that rigour the book could perhaps not more com- 
pletely affirm itself. When we have said that it puts 
on record the "tone," the manners, the general domestic 
proceedings and train de vie of an amiable clergyman's 
family established in one of the more sordid quarters 
of a big black northern city of the Liverpool or Man- 
chester complexion we have advanced as far in the way 
of descriptive statement as the interesting work seems 
to warrant. For it is interesting, in spite of its leav- 
ing itself on our hands with a consistent indifference 
to any question of the charmed application springing 
from it all that places it in the forefront of its type. 
Again as under the effect of Mr. Bennett's major pro- 
ductions our sole inference is that things, the things 
disclosed, go on and on, in any given case, in spite of 
everything — with Mr. Cannan's one discernible care 
perhaps being for how extraordinarily much, in the 
particular example here before him, they were able to 
go on in spite of. The conception, the presentation 
of this enormous inauspicious amount as bearing upon 
the collective career of the Folyats is, we think, as 
near as the author comes at any point to betraying 
an awareness of a subject. Yet again, though so little 
encouraged or "backed," a subject after a fashion makes 
itself, even as it has made itself in "The Old Wives' 
Tale" and in "Clayhanger," in "Sons and Lovers," 
where, as we have hinted, any assistance rendered us 
for a view of one most comfortably enjoys its absence, 
and in Mr. Hugh Walpole's newest novel, where we 
wander scarcely less with our hand in no guiding 
grasp, but where the author's good disposition, as we 
feel it, to provide us with what we lack if he only knew 



THE NEW NOVEL 337 

how, constitutes in itself such a pleading liberality. 
We seem to see him in this spirit lay again and again a 
flowered carpet for our steps. If we do not include 
Mr. Compton Mackenzie to the same extent in our 
generalisation it is really because we note a difference 
in him, a difference in favour of his care for the applica- 
tion. Preoccupations seem at work in "Sinister 
Street," and withal in "Carnival," the brush of which 
we in other quarters scarce even suspect and at some of 
which it will presently be of profit to glance. "I 
answer for it, you know," we seem at any rate to 
hear Mr. Gilbert Cannan say with an admirably 
genuine young pessimism, "I answer for it that they 
were really like that, odd or unpleasant or uncon- 
tributive, and therefore tiresome, as it may strike 
you;" and the charm of Mr. Cannan, so far as up or 
down the rank we so disengage a charm, is that we 
take him at his word. His guarantee, his straight 
communication, of his general truth is a value, and 
values are rare — the flood of fiction is apparently 
capable of running hundreds of miles without a single 
glint of one — and thus in default of satisfaction we 
get stopgaps and are thankful often under a genial 
touch to get even so much. The value indeed is crude, 
it would be quadrupled were it only wrought and 
shaped; yet it has still the rude dignity that it counts 
to us for experience or at least for what we call under 
our present pitch of sensibility force of impression. 
The experience, we feel, is ever something to conclude 
upon, while the impression is content to wait; to wait, 
say, in the spirit in which we must accept this younger 
bustle if we accept it at all, the spirit of its serving as 
a rather presumptuous lesson to us in patience. While 
we wait, again, we are amused — not in the least, also 



338 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

to repeat, up to the notch of our conception of amuse- 
ment, which draws upon still other forms and sources; 
but none the less for the wonder, the intensity, the 
actuality, the probity of the vision. This is much as 
in "Clayhanger" and in "Hilda Lessways," where, 
independently of the effect, so considerably rendered, of 
the long lapse of time, always in this type of recital a 
source of amusement in itself, and certainly of the 
noblest, we get such an admirably substantial thing 
as the collective image of the Orgreaves, the local 
family in whose ample lap the amenities and the hu- 
manities so easily sit, for Mr. Bennett's evocation and 
his protagonist's recognition, and the manner of the 
presentation of whom, with the function and relation 
of the picture at large, strikes such a note of felicity, 
achieves such a simulation of sense, as the author 
should never again be excused for treating, that is for 
neglecting, as beyond his range. Here figures signally 
the interesting case of a compositional function abso- 
lutely performed by mere multiplication, the flow of 
the facts: the Orgreaves, in "Clayhanger," are there, 
by what we make out, but for "life," for general life 
only, and yet, with their office under any general or 
inferential meaning entirely unmarked, come doubt- 
less as near squaring esthetically with the famous 
formula of the "slice of life" as any example that 
could be adduced; happening moreover as they prob- 
ably do to owe this distinction to their coincidence at 
once with reality and charm — a fact esthetically cu- 
rious and delightful. For we attribute the bold stroke 
they represent much more to Mr. Arnold Bennett's 
esthetic instinct than to anything like a calculation 
of his bearings, and more to his thoroughly acquainted 
state, as we may again put it, than to all other causes 



THE NEW NOVEL 339 

together: which strikingly enough shows how much 
complexity of interest may be simulated by mere pres- 
entation of material, mere squeezing of the orange, 
when the material happens to be "handsome" or the 
orange to be sweet. 

Ill 

The orange of our persistent simile is in Mr. Hugh 
Walpole's hands very remarkably sweet — a quality 
we recognise in it even while reduced to observing that 
the squeeze pure and simple, the fond, the lingering, 
the reiterated squeeze, constitutes as yet his main 
perception of method. He enjoys in a high degree 
the consciousness of saturation, and is on such serene 
and happy terms with it as almost make of critical 
interference, in so bright an air, an assault on personal 
felicity. Full of material is thus the author of "The 
Duchess of Wrexe," and of a material which we should 
describe as the consciousness of youth were we not 
rather disposed to call it a peculiar strain of the ex- 
treme unconsciousness. Mr. Walpole offers us indeed 
a rare and interesting case — we see about the field none 
other like it; the case of a positive identity between the 
spirit, not to say the time of life or stage of experience, 
of the aspiring artist and the field itself of his vision. 
"The Duchess of Wrexe" reeks with youth and the 
love of youth and the confidence of youth — youth 
taking on with a charming exuberance the fondest cos- 
tume or disguise, that of an adventurous and voracious 
felt interest, interest in life, in London, in society, in 
character, in Portland Place, in the Oxford Circus, in 
the afternoon tea-table, in the torrid weather, in fifty 
other immediate things as to which its passion and its 



34 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

curiosity are of the sincerest. The wonderful thing is 
that these latter forces operate, in their way, without 
yet being disengaged and hand-free — disengaged, that 
is, from their state of being young, with its billowy 
mufflings and other soft obstructions, the state of 
being present, being involved and aware, close "up 
against" the whole mass of possibilities, being in short 
intoxicated with the mixed liquors of suggestion. In 
the fumes of this acute situation Mr. Walpole's sub- 
ject-matter is bathed; the situation being all the while 
so much more his own and that of a juvenility reacting, 
in the presence of everything, "for all it is worth/' 
than the devised and imagined one, however he may 
circle about some such cluster, that every cupful of 
his excited flow tastes three times as much of his tem- 
peramental freshness as it tastes of this, that or the 
other character or substance, above all of this, that or 
the other group of antecedents and references, sup- 
posed to be reflected in it. All of which does not mean, 
we hasten to add, that the author of "The Duchess of 
Wrexe" has not the gift of life; but only that he strikes 
us as having received it, straight from nature, with 
such a concussion as to have kept the boon at the stage 
of violence — so that, fairly pinned down by it, he is 
still embarrassed for passing it on. On the day he 
shall have worked free of this primitive predicament, 
the crude fact of the convulsion itself, there need be 
no doubt of his exhibiting matter into which method 
may learn how to bite. The tract meanwhile affects 
us as more or less virgin snow, and we look with interest 
and suspense for the imprint of a process. 

If those remarks represent all the while, further, that 
the performances we have glanced at, with others be- 



THE NEW NOVEL 341 

sides, lead our attention on, we hear ourselves the more 
naturally asked what it is then that we expect or want, 
confessing as we do that we have been in a manner 
interested, even though, from case to case, in a vary- 
ing degree, and that Thackeray, Turgenieff, Balzac, 
Dickens, Anatole France, no matter who, can not do 
more than interest. Let us therefore concede to the 
last point that small mercies are better than none, 
that there are latent within the critic numberless lia- 
bilities to being " squared" (the extent to which he may 
on occasion betray his price !) and so great a preference 
for being pleased over not being, that you may again 
and again see him assist with avidity at the attempt 
of the slice of life to butter itself thick. Its explana- 
tion that it is a slice of life and pretends to be nothing 
else figures for us, say, while we watch, the jam super- 
added to the butter. For since the jam, on this sys- 
tem, descends upon our desert, in its form of manna, 
from quite another heaven than the heaven of method, 
the mere demonstration of its agreeable presence is 
alone sufficient to hint at our more than one chance 
of being supernaturally fed. The happy-go-lucky fash- 
ion of it is indeed not then, we grant, an objection so 
long as we do take in refreshment: the meal may be 
of the last informality and yet produce in the event 
no small sense of repletion. The slice of life devoured, 
the butter and the jam duly appreciated, we are ready, 
no doubt, on another day, to trust ourselves afresh to 
the desert. We break camp, that is, and face toward 
a further stretch of it, all in the faith that we shall be 
once more provided for. We take the risk, we enjoy 
more or less the assistance — more or less, we put it, 
for the vision of a possible arrest of the miracle or 
failure of our supply never wholly leaves us. The 



342 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

phenomenon is too uncanny, the happy-go-lucky, as 
we know it in general, never has been trustable to the 
end; the absence of the last true touch in the prepa- 
ration of its viands becomes with each renewal of the 
adventure a more sensible fact. By the last true 
touch we mean of course the touch of the hand of selec- 
tion; the principle of selection having been involved 
at the worst or the least, one would suppose, in any 
approach whatever to the loaf of life with the arriere- 
pensee of a slice. There being no question of a slice 
upon which the further question of where and how to 
cut it does not wait, the office of method, the idea of 
choice and comparison, have occupied the ground from 
the first. This makes clear, to a moment's reflection, 
that there can be no such thing as an amorphous slice, 
and that any waving aside of inquiry as to the sense 
and value of a chunk of matter has to reckon with the 
simple truth of its having been born of naught else but 
measured excision. Reasons have been the fairies 
waiting on its cradle, the possible presence of a bad 
fairy in the form of a bad reason to the contrary not- 
withstanding. It has thus had connections at the 
very first stage of its detachment that are at no later 
stage logically to be repudiated; let it lie as lumpish 
as it will — for adoption, we mean, of the ideal of the 
lump — it has been tainted from too far back with the 
hard liability to form, and thus carries in its very 
breast the hapless contradiction of its sturdy claim to 
have none. This claim has the inevitable challenge 
at once to meet. How can a slice of life be anything 
but illustrational of the loaf, and how can illustration 
not immediately bristle with every sign of the ex- 
tracted and related state ? The relation is at once to 
what the thing comes from and to what it waits upon 



THE NEW NOVEL 343 

— which last is our act of recognition. We accordingly 
appreciate it in proportion as it so accounts for itself; 
the quantity and the intensity of its reference are the 
measure of our knowledge of it. This is exactly why 
illustration breaks down when reference, otherwise ap- 
plication, runs short, and why before any assemblage 
of figures or aspects, otherwise of samples and spec- 
imens, the question of what these are, extensively, 
samples and specimens of declines not to beset us — 
why, otherwise again, we look ever for the supreme 
reference that shall avert the bankruptcy of sense. 

Let us profess all readiness to repeat that we may 
still have had, on the merest "life" system, or that of 
the starkest crudity of the slice, all the entertainment 
that can come from watching a wayfarer engage with 
assurance in an alley that we know to have no issue 
— and from watching for the very sake of the face that 
he may show us on reappearing at its mouth. The 
recitals of Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Gilbert Cannan, 
Mr. D. H. Lawrence, fairly smell of the real, just as 
the "Fortitude" and "The Duchess" of Mr. Hugh 
Walpole smell of the romantic; we have sufficiently 
noted then that, once on the scent, we are capable of 
pushing ahead. How far it is at the same time from 
being all a matter of smell the terms in which we just 
above glanced at the weakness of the spell of the 
happy-go-lucky may here serve to indicate. There 
faces us all the while the fact that the act of considera- 
tion as an incident of the esthetic pleasure, considera- 
tion confidently knowing us to have sooner or later to 
arrive at it, may be again and again postponed, but 
can never hope not some time to fall due. Consid- 
eration is susceptible of many forms, some one or other 



344 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

of which no conscious esthetic effort fails to cry out 
for; and the simplest description of the cry of the 
novel when sincere — for have we not heard such com- 
positions bluff us, as it were, with false cries ? — is as 
an appeal to us when we have read it once to read it 
yet again. That is the act of consideration; no other 
process of considering approaches this for directness, 
so that anything short of it is virtually not to consider 
at all. The word has sometimes another sense, that of 
the appeal to us not, for the world, to go back — this 
being of course consideration of a sort; the sort clearly 
that the truly flushed production should be the last to 
invoke. The effect of consideration, we need scarce 
remark, is to light for us in a work of art the hundred 
questions of how and why and whither, and the effect 
of these questions, once lighted, is enormously to thicken 
and complicate, even if toward final clarifications, 
what we have called the amused state produced in us 
by the work. The more our amusement multiplies 
its terms the more fond and the more rewarded con- 
sideration becomes; the fewer it leaves them, on the 
other hand, the less to be resisted for us is the impres- 
sion of "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds 
sang." Birds that have appeared to sing, or whose 
silence we have not heeded, on a first perusal, prove 
on a second to have no note to contribute, and whether 
or no a second is enough to admonish us of those we 
miss, we mostly expect much from it in the way of 
emphasis of those we find. Then it is that notes of 
intention become more present or more absent; then 
it is that we take the measure of what we have already 
called our effective provision. The bravest providers 
and designers show at this point something still in 
store which only the second rummage was appointed 



THE NEW NOVEL 345 

to draw forth. To the variety of these ways of not 
letting our fondness fast is there not practically no 
limit ? — and of the arts, the devices, the graces, the 
subtle secrets applicable to such an end what pre- 
sumptuous critic shall pretend to draw the list ? Let 
him for the moment content himself with saying that 
many of the most effective are mysteries, precisely, of 
method, or that even when they are not most essen- 
tially and directly so it takes method, blest method, to 
extract their soul and to determine their action. 

It is odd and delightful perhaps that at the very 
moment of our urging this truth we should happen to 
be regaled with a really supreme specimen of the part 
playable in a novel by the source of interest, the prin- 
ciple of provision attended to, for which we claim 
importance. Mr. Joseph Conrad's "Chance" is none 
the less a signal instance of provision the most earnest 
and the most copious for its leaving ever so much to 
be said about the particular provision effected. It is 
none the less an extraordinary exhibition of method by 
the fact that the method is, we venture to say, without 
a precedent in any like work. It places Mr. Conrad 
absolutely alone as a votary of the way to do a thing 
that shall make it undergo most doing. The way to 
do it that shall make it undergo least is the line on 
which we are mostly now used to see prizes carried 
off; so that the author of "Chance" gathers up on 
this showing all sorts of comparative distinction. He 
gathers up at least two sorts — that of bravery in abso- 
lutely reversing the process most accredited, and that, 
quite separate, we make out, of performing the ma- 
noeuvre under salvos of recognition. It is not in these 
days often given to a refinement of design to be recog- 



346 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

nised, but Mr. Conrad has made his achieve that 
miracle — save in so far indeed as the miracle has been 
one thing and the success another. The miracle is of 
the rarest, confounding all calculation and suggesting 
more reflections than we can begin to make place for 
here; but the sources of surprise surrounding it might 
be, were this possible, even greater and yet leave the 
fact itself in all independence, the fact that the whole 
undertaking was committed by its very first step either 
to be "art" exclusively or to be nothing. This is the 
prodigious rarity, since surely we have known for many 
a day no other such case of the whole clutch of eggs, 
and these withal of the freshest, in that one basket; 
to which it may be added that if we say for many a 
day this is not through our readiness positively to 
associate the sight with any very definite moment of 
the past. What concerns us is that the general effect 
of " Chance" is arrived at by a pursuance of means 
to the end in view contrasted with which every other 
current form of the chase can only affect us as cheap 
and futile; the carriage of the burden or amount of 
service required on these lines exceeding surely all 
other such displayed degrees of energy put together. 
Nothing could well interest us more than to see the 
exemplary value of attention, attention given by the 
author and asked of the reader, attested in a case in 
which it has had almost unspeakable difficulties to 
struggle with — since so we are moved to qualify the 
particular difficulty Mr. Conrad has "elected" to 
face: the claim for method in itself, method in this 
very sense of attention applied, would be somehow less 
lighted if the difficulties struck us as less consciously, 
or call it even less wantonly, invoked. What they 
consist of we should have to diverge here a little to say, 



THE NEW NOVEL 347 

and should even then probably but lose ourselves in 
the dim question of why so special, eccentric and des- 
perate a course, so deliberate a plunge into threatened 
frustration, should alone have seemed open. It has 
been the course, so far as three words may here serve, 
of his so multiplying his creators or, as we are now 
fond of saying, producers, as to make them almost 
more numerous and quite emphatically more material 
than the creatures and the production itself in whom 
and which we by the general law of fiction expect such 
agents to lose themselves. We take for granted by the 
general law of fiction a primary author, take him so 
much for granted that we forget him in proportion as 
he works upon us, and that he works upon us most in 
fact by making us forget him. 

Mr. Conrad's first care on the other hand is expressly 
to posit or set up a reciter, a definite responsible in- 
tervening first person singular, possessed of infinite 
sources of reference, who immediately proceeds to set 
up another, to the end that this other may conform 
again to the practice, and that even at that point the 
bridge over to the creature, or in other words to the 
situation or the subject, the thing "produced," shall, 
if the fancy takes it, once more and yet once more 
glory in a gap. It is easy to see how heroic the under- 
taking of an effective fusion becomes on these terms, 
fusion between what we are to know and that prodigy 
of our knowing which is ever half the very beauty of 
the atmosphere of authenticity; from the moment the 
reporters are thus multiplied from pitch to pitch the 
tone of each, especially as "rendered" by his precursor 
in the series, becomes for the prime poet of all an im- 
mense question — these circumferential tones having 



348 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

not only to be such individually separate notes, but to 
keep so clear of the others, the central, the numerous 
and various voices of the agents proper, those express- 
ive of the action itself and in whom the objectivity 
resides. We usually escape the worst of this dif- 
ficulty of a tone about the tone of our characters, our 
projected performers, by keeping it single, keeping it 
"down" and thereby comparatively impersonal or, as 
we may say, inscrutable; which is what a creative 
force, in its blest fatuity, likes to be. But the omnis- 
cience, remaining indeed nameless, though constantly 
active, which sets Marlow's omniscience in motion 
from the very first page, insisting on a reciprocity 
with it throughout, this original omniscience invites 
consideration of itself only in a degree less than that 
in which Marlow's own invites it; and Marlow's own 
is a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the 
outstretched ground of the case exposed. We make 
out this ground but through the shadow cast by the 
flight, clarify it though the real author visibly reminds 
himself again and again that he must — all the more 
that, as if by some tremendous forecast of future ap- 
plied science, the upper aeroplane causes another, as 
we have said, to depend from it and that one still 
another; these dropping shadow after shadow, to the 
no small menace of intrinsic colour and form and 
whatever, upon the passive expanse. What shall we 
most call Mr. Conrad's method accordingly but his 
attempt to clarify quand meme — ridden as he has been, 
we perceive at the end of fifty pages of "Chance," by 
such a danger of steeping his matter in perfect eventual 
obscuration as we recall no other artist's consenting to 
with an equal grace. This grace, which presently 
comes over us as the sign of the whole business, is Mr. 






THE NEW NOVEL 349 

Conrad's gallantry itself, and the shortest account of 
the rest of the connection for our present purpose is 
that his gallantry is thus his success. It literally strikes 
us that his volume sets in motion more than anything 
else a drama in which his own system and his com- 
bined eccentricities of recital represent the protagonist 
in face of powers leagued against it, and of which the 
denouement gives us the system fighting in triumph, 
though with its back desperately to the wall, and lay- 
ing the powers piled up at its feet. This frankly has 
been our spectacle, our suspense and our thrill; with 
the one flaw on the roundness of it all the fact that the 
predicament was not imposed rather than invoked, 
was not the effect of a challenge from without, but that 
of a mystic impulse from within. 

Of an exquisite refinement at all events are the 
critical questions opened up in the attempt, the ques- 
tion in particular of by what it exactly is that the ex- 
periment is crowned. Pronouncing it crowned and 
the case saved by sheer gallantry, as we did above, is 
perhaps to fall just short of the conclusion we might 
reach were we to push further. "Chance" is an ex- 
ample of objectivity, most precious of aims, not only 
menaced but definitely compromised; whereby we are 
in presence of something really of the strangest, a 
general and diffused lapse of authenticity which an 
inordinate number of common readers — since it always 
takes this and these to account encouragingly for 
"editions'' — have not only condoned but have em- 
phatically commended. They can have done this but 
through the bribe of some authenticity other in kind, 
no doubt, and seeming to them equally great if not 
greater, which gives back by the left hand what the 



350 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

right has, with however dissimulated a grace, taken 
away. What Mr. Conrad's left hand gives back then 
is simply Mr. Conrad himself. We asked above what 
would become, by such a form of practice, of indis- 
pensable "fusion" or, to call it by another name, of 
the fine process by which our impatient material, at 
a given moment, shakes off the humiliation of the 
handled, the fumbled state, puts its head in the air 
and, to its own beautiful illusory consciousness at 
least, simply runs its race. Such an amount of han- 
dling and fumbling and repointing has it, on the system 
of the multiplied "putter into marble," to shake off! 
And yet behold, the sense of discomfort, as the show 
here works out, has been conjured away. The fusion 
has taken place, or at any rate a fusion; only it has 
been transferred in wondrous fashion to an unexpected, 
and on the whole more limited plane of operation; it 
has succeeded in getting effected, so to speak, not on 
the ground but in the air, not between our writer's 
idea and his machinery, but between the different 
parts of his genius itself. His genius is what is left 
over from the other, the compromised and compro- 
mising quantities — the Marlows and their determi- 
nant inventors and interlocutors, the Powells, the 
Franklins, the Fynes, the tell-tale little dogs, the suc- 
cessive members of a cue from one to the other of 
which the sense and the interest of the subject have 
to be passed on together, in the manner of the buckets 
of water for the improvised extinction of a fire, before 
reaching our apprehension: all with whatever result, 
to this apprehension, of a quantity to be allowed for 
as spilt by the way. The residuum has accordingly 
the form not of such and such a number of images 
discharged and ordered, but that rather of a wander- 
ing, circling, yearning imaginative j acuity, encountered 



THE NEW NOVEL 351 

in its habit as it lives and diffusing itself as a presence 
or a tide, a noble sociability of vision. So we have as 
the force that fills the cup just the high-water mark of 
a beautiful and generous mind at play in conditions 
comparatively thankless — thoroughly, unweariedly, 
yet at the same time ever so elegantly at play, and 
doing more for itself than it succeeds in getting done 
for it. Than which nothing could be of a greater 
reward to critical curiosity were it not still for the 
wonder of wonders, a new page in the record altogether 
— the fact that these things are apparently what the 
common reader has seen and understood. Great then 
would seem to be after all the common reader ! 



IV 

We must not fail of the point, however, that we 
have made these remarks not at all with an eye to the 
question of whether "Chance" has been well or ill 
inspired as to its particular choice of a way of really 
attending to itself among all the possible alternatives, 
but only on the ground of its having compared, se- 
lected and held on; since any alternative that might 
have been preferred and that should have been effect- 
ively adopted would point our moral as well — and this 
even if it is of profit none the less to note the most 
striking of Mr. Conrad's compositional consequences. 
There is one of these that has had most to do with 
making his pages differ in texture, and to our very 
first glance, from that straggle of ungoverned verbiage 
which leads us up and down those of his fellow fabu- 
lists in general on a vain hunt for some projected mass 
of truth, some solidity of substance, as to which the 
deluge of "dialogue," the flooding report of things said, 
or at least of words pretendedly spoken, shall have 



352 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

learned the art of being merely illustrational. What 
first springs from any form of real attention, no mat- 
ter which, we on a comparison so made quickly per- 
ceive to be a practical challenge of the preposterous 
pretension of this most fatuous of the luxuries of loose- 
ness to acquit itself with authority of the structural 
and compositional office. Infinitely valid and vivid 
as illustration, it altogether depends for dignity and 
sense upon our state of possession of its historic pre- 
liminaries, its promoting conditions, its supporting 
ground; that is upon our waiting occupancy of the 
chamber it proposes to light and which, when no other 
source of effect is more indicated, it doubtless quite 
inimitably fills with life. Then its relation to what 
encloses and confines and, in its sovereign interest, 
finely compresses it, offering it constituted aspects, 
surfaces, presences, faces and figures of the matter we 
are either generally or acutely concerned with to play 
over and hang upon, then this relation gives it all its 
value: it has flowered from the soil prepared and sheds 
back its richness into the field of cultivation. It is 
interesting, in a word, only when nothing else is equally 
so, carrying the vessel of the interest with least of a 
stumble or a sacrifice; but it is of the essence that the 
sounds so set in motion (it being as sound above all 
that they undertake to convey sense,) should have 
something to proceed from, in their course, to address 
themselves to and be affected by, with all the sensibil- 
ity of sounds. It is of the essence that they should 
live in a medium, and in a medium only, since it takes 
a medium to give them an identity, the intenser the 
better, and that the medium should subserve them by 
enjoying in a like degree the luxury of an existence. 
We need of course scarce expressly note that the play, 



THE NEW NOVEL 353 

as distinguished from the novel, lives exclusively on 
the spoken word — not on the report of the thing said 
but, directly and audibly, on that very thing; that it 
thrives by its law on the exercise under which the 
novel hopelessly collapses when the attempt is made 
disproportionately to impose it. There is no danger 
for the play of the cart before the horse, no disaster 
involved in it; that form being all horse and the 
interest itself mounted and astride, and not, as that 
of the novel, dependent in the first instance on wheels. 
The order in which the drama simply says things gives 
it all its form, while the story told and the picture 
painted, as the novel at the pass we have brought it 
to embraces them, reports of an infinite diversity of 
matters, gathers together and gives out again a hun- 
dred sorts, and finds its order and its structure, its 
unity and its beauty, in the alternation of parts and 
the adjustment of differences. It is no less apparent 
that the novel may be fundamentally organised — such 
things as "The Egoist" and "The Awkward Age" are 
there to prove it; but in this case it adheres uncon- 
fusedly to that logic and has nothing to say to any 
other. Were it not for a second exception, one at this 
season rather pertinent, "Chance" then, to return to 
it a moment, would be as happy an example as we 
might just now put our hand on of the automatic 
working of a scheme unfavourable to that treatment 
of the colloquy by endless dangling strings which 
makes the current "story" in general so figure to us 
a porcupine of extravagant yet abnormally relaxed 
bristles. 

The exception we speak of would be Mrs. Wharton's 
"Custom of the Country," in which, as in this lady's 



354 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

other fictions, we recognise the happy fact of an abuse 
of no one of the resources it enjoys at the expense of 
the others; the whole series offering as general an 
example of dialogue flowering and not weeding, illus- 
trational and not itself starved of illustration, or 
starved of referability and association, which is the 
same thing, as meets the eye in any glance that leaves 
Mr. Wells at Mr. Wells's best-inspired hour out of our 
own account. The truth is, however, that Mrs. Whar- 
ton is herself here out of our account, even as we 
have easily recognised Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Mau- 
rice Hewlett to be; these three authors, with what- 
ever differences between them, remaining essentially 
votaries of selection and intention and being embodi- 
ments thereby, in each case, of some state over and 
above that simple state of possession of much evi- 
dence, that confused conception of what the "slice" 
of life must consist of, which forms the text of our 
remarks. Mrs. Wharton, her conception of the "slice" 
so clarified and cultivated, would herself of course 
form a text in quite another connection, as Mr. Hew- 
lett and Mr. Galsworthy would do each in his own, 
which we abstain from specifying; but there are two 
or three grounds on which the author of "Ethan 
Frome," "The Valley of Decision" and "The House 
of Mirth," whom we brush by with reluctance, would 
point the moral of the treasure of amusement sitting 
in the lap of method with a felicity peculiarly her own. 
If one of these is that she too has clearly a saturation 
— which it would be ever so interesting to determine 
and appreciate — we have it from her not in the crude 
state but in the extract, the extract that makes all 
the difference for our sense of an artistic economy. 
If the extract, as would appear, is the result of an 






THE NEW NOVEL 355 

artistic economy, as the latter is its logical motive, so 
we find it associated in Mrs. Wharton with such ap- 
peals to our interest, for instance, as the fact that, 
absolutely sole among our students of this form, she 
suffers, she even encourages, her expression to flower 
into some sharp image or figure of her thought when 
that will make the thought more finely touch us. Her 
step, without straying, encounters the living analogy, 
which she gathers, in passing, without awkwardness of 
pause, and which the page then carries on its breast 
as a trophy plucked by a happy adventurous dash, a 
token of spirit and temper as well as a proof of vision. 
We note it as one of the kinds of proof of vision that 
most fail us in that comparative desert of the inselect- 
ive where our imagination has itself to hunt out or 
call down (often among strange witnessed flounderings 
or sand-storms) such analogies as may mercifully "put" 
the thing. Mrs. Wharton not only owes to her culti- 
vated art of putting it the distinction enjoyed when 
some ideal of expression has the whole of the case, the 
case once made its concern, in charge, but might fur- 
ther act for us, were we to follow up her exhibition, 
as lighting not a little that question of "tone," the 
author's own intrinsic, as to which we have just seen 
Mr. Conrad's late production rather tend to darken 
counsel. "The Custom of the Country" is an emi- 
nent instance of the sort of tonic value most opposed 
to that baffled relation between the subject-matter 
and its emergence which we find constituted by the 
circumvalations of "Chance." Mrs. Wharton's reac- 
tion in presence of the aspects of life hitherto, it would 
seem, mainly exposed to her is for the most part the 
ironic — to which we gather that these particular aspects 
have so much ministered that, were we to pursue the 



356 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

quest, we might recognise in them precisely the sat- 
uration as to which we a moment ago reserved our 
judgment. "The Custom of the Country" is at any 
rate consistently, almost scientifically satiric, as indeed 
the satiric light was doubtless the only one in which 
the elements engaged could at all be focussed together. 
But this happens directly to the profit of something 
that, as we read, becomes more and more one with 
the principle of authority at work; the light that 
gathers is a dry light, of great intensity, and the effect, 
if not rather the very essence, of its dryness is a par- 
ticular fine asperity. The usual "creative" conditions 
and associations, as we have elsewhere languished 
among them, are thanks to this ever so sensibly altered; 
the general authoritative relation attested becomes clear 
— we move in an air purged at a stroke of the old sen- 
timental and romantic values, the perversions with the 
maximum of waste of perversions, and we shall not 
here attempt to state what this makes for in the way 
of esthetic refreshment and relief; the waste having 
kept us so dangling on the dark esthetic abyss. A 
shade of asperity may be in such fashion a security 
against waste, and in the dearth of displayed securities 
we should welcome it on that ground alone. It helps 
at any rate to constitute for the talent manifest in 
"The Custom" a rare identity, so far should we have 
to go to seek another instance of the dry, or call it 
perhaps even the hard, intellectual touch in the soft, 
or call it perhaps even the humid, temperamental air; 
in other words of the masculine conclusion tending so 
to crown the feminine observation. 

If we mentioned Mr. Compton Mackenzie at the 
beginning of these reflections only to leave him wait- 



THE NEW NOVEL 357 

ing for some further appreciation, this is exactly be- 
cause his case, to the most interesting effect, is no 
simple one, like two or three of our others, but on the 
contrary mystifying enough almost to stand by itself. 
What would be this striking young writer's state of 
acquaintance and possession, and should we find it, 
on our recognition of it, to be all he is content to 
pitch forth, without discriminations or determinants, 
without motives or lights ? Do "Carnival" and "Sin- 
ister Street" proceed from the theory of the slice or 
from the conception of the extract, "the extract flasked 
and fine," the chemical process superseding the me- 
chanical ? Mr. Compton Mackenzie's literary aspect, 
though decidedly that of youth, or that of experience, 
a great deal of young experience, in its freshness, offers 
the attraction of a complexity defiant of the prompt 
conclusion, really charms us by giving us something 
to wonder about. We literally find it not easy to say 
if there may not lurk in "Carnival," for example* a 
selective sense more apprehensible, to a push of in- 
quiry, than its overflooded surface, a real invitation to 
wade and upon which everything within the author's 
ken appears poured out, would at first lead us to sus- 
pect. The question comes up in like fashion as to the 
distinctly more developed successor of that work, be- 
fore which we in fact find questions multiply to a posi- 
tive quickening of critical pleasure. We ask ourselves 
what "Sinister Street" may mean as a whole in spite 
of our sense of being brushed from the first by a hun- 
dred subordinate purposes, the succession and alter- 
nation of which seem to make after a fashion a plan, 
and which, though full of occasional design, yet fail 
to gather themselves for application or to converge to 
an idea. Any idea will serve, ever, that has held up 






358 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

its candle to composition — and it is perhaps because 
composition proposes itself under Mr. Compton Mac- 
kenzie's energy on a scale well-nigh of the most pro- 
digious that we must wait to see whither it tends. 
The question of what he may here mean "on the 
whole," as we just said, is doubtless admonished to 
stand back till we be possessed of the whole. This 
interesting volume is but a first, committed up to its 
eyes to continuity and with an announced sequel to 
follow. The recital exhibits at the point we have 
reached the intimate experience of a boy at school and 
in his holidays, the amplification of which is to come 
with his terms and their breaks at a university; and 
the record will probably form a more squared and ex- 
tended picture of life equally conditioned by the ex- 
tremity of youth than we shall know where else to 
look for. Youth clearly has been Mr. Mackenzie's 
saturation, as it has been Mr. Hugh Walpole's, but 
we see this not as a subject (youth in itself is no spe- 
cific subject, any more than age is,) but as matter for 
a subject and as requiring a motive to redeem it from 
the merely passive state of the slice. We are sure 
throughout both "Sinister Street" and "Carnival" of 
breathing the air of the extract, as we contentiously 
call it, only in certain of the rounded episodes strung 
on the loose cord as so many vivid beads, each of its 
chosen hue, and the series of which, even with differ- 
ences of price between them, we take for a lively gage 
of performance to come. These episodes would be 
easy to cite; they are handsomely numerous and each 
strikes us as giving in its turn great salience to its mo- 
tive; besides which each is in its turn "done" with 
an eminent sense and a remarkably straight hand for 
doing. They may well be cited together as both sig- 
nally and finely symptomatic, for the literary gesture 



THE NEW NOVEL 359 

and the bravura breadth with which such frequent 
medallions as the adventure on the boy's part of the 
Catholic church at Bournemouth, as his experiment of 
the Benedictine house in Wiltshire, as his period of 
acquaintance with the esthetic cenacle in London, as 
his relation with his chosen school friend under the 
intensity of boyish choosing, are ornamentally hung 
up, differ not so much in degree as in kind from any 
play of presentation that we mostly see elsewhere of- 
fered us. To which we might add other like matters 
that we lack space to enumerate, the scene, the aspect, 
the figure in motion tending always, under touches 
thick and strong, to emerge and flush, sound and strike, 
catch us in its truth. We have read "tales of school 
life" in which the boys more or less swarmed and 
sounded, but from which the masters have practically 
been quite absent, to the great weakening of any pic- 
ture of the boyish consciousness, on which the magis- 
terial fact is so heavily projected. If that is less true 
for some boys than for others, the " point" of Michael 
Fane is that for him it is truest. The types of mas- 
ters have in "Sinister Street" both number and sali- 
ence, rendered though they be mostly as grotesques — 
which effect we take as characterising the particular 
turn of mind of the young observer and discoverer 
commemorated. 

That he is a discoverer is of the essence of his in- 
terest, a successful and resourceful young discoverer, 
even as the poor ballet-girl in "Carnival" is a trag- 
ically baffled and helpless one; so that what each of 
the works proposes to itself is a recital of the things 
discovered. Those thus brought to our view in the 
boy's case are of much more interest, to our sense, 
than like matters in the other connection, thanks to 



3 6o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

his remarkable and living capacity; the heroine of 
"Carnival" is frankly too minute a vessel of experi- 
ence for treatment on the scale on which the author 
has honoured her — she is done assuredly, but under 
multiplications of touch that become too much, in the 
narrow field, monotonies; and she leaves us asking al- 
most as much what she exhibition ally means, what ap- 
plication resides in the accumulation of facts concern- 
ing her, as if she too were after all but a slice, or at 
the most but a slice of a slice, and her history but one 
of the aspects, on her author's part, of the condition 
of repleteness against the postulate of the entire ade- 
quacy of which we protest. So far as this record does 
affect us as an achieved "extract," to reiterate our 
term, that result abides in its not losing its centre, 
which is its fidelity to the one question of her dole- 
fully embarrassed little measure of life. We know to 
that extent with some intensity what her producer 
would be at, yet an element of the arbitrary hangs for 
us about the particular illustration — illustrations leav- 
ing us ever but half appreciative till we catch that one 
bright light in which they give out all they contain. 
This light is of course always for the author to set 
somewhere. Is it set then so much as it should be 
in "Sinister Street," and is our impression of the 
promise of this recital one with a dawning divination 
of the illustrative card that Mr. Mackenzie may still 
have up his sleeve and that our after sense shall recog- 
nise as the last thing left on the table ? By no means, 
we can as yet easily say, for if a boy's experience has 
ever been given us for its face value simply, for what 
it is worth in mere recovered intensity, it is so given 
us here. Of all the saturations it can in fact scarce 
have helped being the most sufficient in itself, for it 



THE NEW NOVEL 361 

is exactly, where it is best, from beginning to end the 
remembered and reported thing, that thing alone, that 
thing existent in the field of memory, though gaining 
value too from the applied intelligence, or in other 
words from the lively talent, of the memoriser. The 
memoriser helps, he contributes, he completes, and 
what we have admired in him is that in the case of 
each of the pearls fished up by his dive — though in- 
deed these fruits of the rummage are not all pearls — 
his mind has had a further iridescence to confer. It 
is the fineness of the iridescence that on such an occa- 
sion matters, and this appeal to our interest is again 
and again on Mr. Compton Mackenzie's page of the 
happiest and the brightest. It is never more so than 
when we catch him, as we repeatedly do, in the act 
of positively caring for his expression as expression, 
positively providing for his phrase as a fondly fore- 
seeing parent for a child, positively loving it in the 
light of what it may do for him — meeting revelations, 
that is, in what it may do, and appearing to recognise 
that the value of the offered thing, its whole relation 
to us, is created by the breath of language, that on 
such terms exclusively, for appropriation and enjoy- 
ment, we know it, and that any claimed independence 
of "form" on its part is the most abject of fallacies. 
Do these things mean that, moved by life, this inter- 
esting young novelist is even now uncontrollably on 
the way to style ? We might cite had we space sev- 
eral symptoms, the very vividest, of that possibility; 
though such an appearance in the field of our general 
survey has against it presumptions enough to bring us 
surely back to our original contention — the scant de- 
gree in which that field has ever had to reckon with 
criticism. 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 

i89S 

One of the things that most bring home his time of 
life to a man of fifty is the increase of the rate at 
which he loses his friends. Some one dies every week, 
some one dies every day, and if the rate be high among 
his coevals it is higher still in the generation that, on 
awaking to spectatorship, he found in possession of the 
stage. He begins to feel his own world, the world of 
his most vivid impressions, gradually become histor- 
ical. He is present, and closely present, at the proc- 
ess by which legend grows up. He sees the friends 
in question pictured as only death can picture them — 
a master superior to the Rembrandts and Titians. 
They have been of many sorts and many degrees, 
they have been private and public, but they have had 
in common that they were the furniture of this first 
fresh world, the world in which associations are formed. 
That one by one they go is what makes the main dif- 
ference in it. The landscape of life, in foreground and 
distance, becomes, as the painters say, another com- 
position, another subject; and quite as much as the 
objects directly under our eyes we miss the features 
that have educated for us our sense of proportion. 

Among such features for the author of these lines 
the younger Dumas, who has just passed away, was 
in the public order long one of the most conspicuous. 
Suffused as he is already with the quick historic haze, 
fixed, for whatever term, in his ultimate value, he ap- 

362 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 363 

peals to me, I must begin by declaring, as a party to 
one of these associations that have the savour of the 
prime. I knew him only in his work, but he is the 
object of an old-time sentiment for the beginning of 
which I have to go back absurdly far. He arrived 
early — he was so loudly introduced by his name. I 
am tempted to say that I knew him when he was 
young, but what I suppose I mean is that I knew him 
when I myself was. I knew him indeed when we 
both were, for I recall that in Paris, in distant days 
and undeveloped conditions, I was aware with per- 
haps undue and uncanny precocity of his first successes. 
There emerges in my memory from the night of time 
the image of a small boy walking in the Palais Royal 
with innocent American girls who were his cousins and 
wistfully hearing them relate how many times (they 
lived in Paris) they had seen Madame Doche in "La 
Dame aux Camelias" and what floods of tears she 
had made them weep. It was the first time I had 
heard of pockethandkerchiefs as a provision for the 
play. I had no remotest idea of the social position 
of the lady of the expensive flowers, and the artless 
objects of my envy had, in spite of their repeated 
privilege, even less of one; but her title had a strange 
beauty and her story a strange meaning — things that 
ever after were to accompany the name of the author 
with a faint yet rich echo. The younger Dumas, after 
all, was then not only relatively but absolutely young; 
the American infants, privileged and unprivileged, were 
only somewhat younger; the former going with their 
bonne, who must have enjoyed the adventure, to the 
"upper boxes" of the old Vaudeville of the Place de 
la Bourse, where later on I remember thinking Ma- 
dame Fargueil divine. He was quite as fortunate 



364 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

moreover in his own designation as in that of his hero- 
ine; for it emphasised that bloom of youth (I don't 
say bloom of innocence — a very different matter) which 
was the signal-note of the work destined, in the world 
at large, to bring him nine-tenths of his celebrity* 

Written at twenty-five "La Dame aux Camelias" 
remains in its combination of freshness and form, of 
the feeling of the springtime of life and the sense of 
the conditions of the theatre, a singular, an astonish- 
ing production. The author has had no time to part 
with his illusions, but has had full opportunity to mas- 
ter the most difficult of the arts. Consecrated as he 
was to this mastery he never afterwards showed greater 
adroitness than he had then done in keeping his knowl- 
edge and his naivete from spoiling each other. The 
play has been blown about the world at a fearful rate, 
but it has never lost its happy juvenility, a charm 
that nothing can vulgarise. It is all champagne and 
tears — fresh perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion, 
fresh pain. We have each seen it both well done and 
ill done, and perhaps more particularly the latter — in 
strange places, in barbarous tongues, with Marguerite 
Gautier fat and Armand Duval old. I remember ages 
ago in Boston a version in which this young lady and 
this young gentleman were represented as "engaged": 
that indeed for all I know may still be the form in 
which the piece most enjoys favour with the Anglo- 
Saxon public. Nothing makes any difference — it car- 
ries with it an April air: some tender young man and 
some coughing young woman have only to speak the 
lines to give it a great place among the love-stories 
of the world. I recollect coming out of the Gymnase 
one night when Madame Pierson had been the Mar- 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 365 

guerite — this was very long since — and giving myself 
up on the boulevard to a fine critical sense of what 
in such a composition was flimsy and what was false. 
Somehow, none the less, my fine critical sense never 
prevented my embracing the next opportunity to ex- 
pose it to the same irritation; for I have been, I am 
happy to think to-day, a playgoer who, whatever else 
he may have had on his conscience, has never had the 
neglect of any chance to see this dramatist acted. 
Least of all, within a much shorter period, has it un- 
dermined one's kindness to have had occasion to ad- 
mire in connection with the piece such an artist for 
instance as Eleonora Duse. We have seen Madame 
Duse this year or two in her tattered translation, with 
few advantages, with meagre accessories and with one 
side of the character of the heroine scarcely touched at 
all — so little indeed that the Italian version joins hands 
with the American and the relation of Marguerite and 
Armand seems to present itself as a question of the 
consecrated even if not approved "union." For this 
interesting actress, however, the most beautiful thing 
is always the great thing, and her performance — if seen 
on a fortunate evening — lives in the mind as a fine 
vindication of the play. I am not sure indeed that 
it is the very performance Dumas intended; but he 
lived long enough to have forgotten perhaps what that 
performance was. He might on some sides, I think, 
have accepted Madame Duse's as a reminder. 

If I have stopped to be myself so much reminded, it 
is because after and outside of "La Dame aux Came- 
lias" Dumas really never figured among us all again — 
a circumstance full of illustration of one of the most 
striking of our peculiarities, the capacity for granting 



3 66 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

a prodigious ear to some one manifestation of an au- 
thor's talent and caring nothing whatever for the 
others. It is solely the manifestation and never the 
talent that interests us, and nothing is stranger than 
the fact that no critic has ever explained on our behalf 
the system by which we hurl ourselves on a writer 
to-day and stare at him to-morrow as if we had never 
heard of him. It gives us the air of perpetually awak- 
ing from mistakes, but it renders obscure all our can- 
ons of judgment. A great force makes a great suc- 
cess, but a great force is furthermore no less a great 
force on Friday than on Monday. Was the reader a 
sorry dupe on the first day, or is the writer a wanton 
sacrifice on the second ? That the public is intelligent 
on both occasions is a claim it can scarcely make: it 
can only choose between having its acuteness impugned 
or its manners condemned. At any rate if we have in 
England and the United States only the two alterna- 
tives of the roar of the market and the silence of the 
tomb the situation is apt to be different in France, 
where the quality that goes into a man's work and 
gives it an identity is the source of the attention ex- 
cited. It happens that the interest in the play of the 
genius is greater there than the "boom" of the par- 
ticular hit, the concern primarily for the author rather 
than the subject, instead of, as among ourselves, pri- 
marily for the subject rather than the author. Is this 
because the French have been acute enough to reflect 
that authors comprehend subjects, but that subjects 
can unfortunately not be said to comprehend authors ? 
Literature would be a merry game if the business were 
arranged in the latter fashion. However such a ques- 
tion may be answered, Dumas was in his own coun- 
try, to the end, the force that, save in connection 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 367 

with his first play, he failed to become elsewhere; and 
if he was there much the most original worker in his 
field one of the incidental signs of his originality was 
that, despite our inveterate practice, in theatrical mat- 
ters, of helping ourselves from our neighbour's plate, 
he was inveterately not a convenience to us. We 
picked our morsels from the plates of smaller people — 
we never found on that of the author of "Le Fils 
Naturel" any we could swallow. He was not to our 
poor purpose, and I cannot help thinking that this 
helps a little to give his artistic measure. It would 
be a bad note for him now if we had found him amen- 
able to that graceless game of which we show signs 
to-day of having grown ashamed, but which flourished 
for years in two imperturbable communities as the art 
of theatrical adaptation. A Dumas adaptable is a 
Dumas inconceivable; and in point of fact he was 
touched by the purveyors of the English-speaking stage 
only to prove fatal to them. If the history of so 
mean a traffic as the one here glanced at were worth 
writing it would throw light on some odd conceptions 
of the delicacy in the abused name of which it was 
carried on. It is all to the honour of our author's 
seriousness that he was, in such conditions, so unman- 
ageable; though one must of course hasten to add 
that this seriousness was not the only reason of it. 
There were several others, not undiscoverable, and the 
effect of the whole combination was, in view of the 
brilliant fortune of his productions at home and the 
eager foraging of English and American speculators, 
to place him on a footing all his own. He was of 
active interest among us only to individual observers 
— simply as one of the most devoted of whom I trace 
these few pages of commemoration. 



368 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

It takes some analysis, yet is not impossible, to ex- 
plain why among the men of his time to whom the 
creative gift had been granted his image, for sundry 
such admirers, always presented him as somehow th 
happiest consciousness. They were perhaps not al- 
ways aware of it, but now that he is gone they hav 
a revelation of the place he occupied in the envioi 
mind. This envy flowed doubtless, to begin with 
from the sense of his extraordinarily firm grasp of his 
hard refractory art; the grasp that had put him into 
possession of it without fumblings or gropings made 
him canter away on the back of it the moment he had 
touched the stirrup. He had the air through all his 
career of a man riding a dangerous horse without ever 
being thrown. Every one else had a fall — he alone 
never really quitted the saddle, never produced a play 
that was not to stay to be revived and in the case of 
his comparative failures enjoy some sort of revenge, 
even to that of travelling in the repertory of great 
actresses round the globe. Such travels, moreover, 
much as they may please his shade, are far from hav- 
ing been the only felicities of his long career. The 
others strike me as so numerous that I scarcely indeed 
know where to begin to reckon them. Greatly even 
if oddly auspicious for instance was just his stark son- 
ship to his prodigious father, his having been launched 
with that momentum into the particular world in 
which he was to live. It was a privilege to make up 
for the legal irregularity attaching to his birth; we 
think of it really almost to wonder that it didn't lift 
him on a still higher wave. His limitations, which 
one encounters with a sort of violence, were not to be 
overlooked; it expresses them in some degree to say 
that he was bricked up in his hard Parisianism, but 






DUMAS THE YOUNGER 369 

it is also incontestable that some of them were much 
^concerned in producing his firm and easy equilibrium. 
We understand, however, the trap they set for him 
fhen we reflect that a certain omniscience, a great 
oreadth of horizon, may well have seemed to him to 
e transmitted, in his blood, from such a boundless 
( >untain of life. What mattered to him the fact of a 
each of reference that stopped at the banlieue, when 
experience had sat at his cradle in the shape not at 
all of a fairy godmother but of an immediate progeni- 
tor who was at once fabulous and familiar ? He had 
been encompassed by all history in being held in such 
arms — it was an entrance into possession of more mat- 
ters than he could even guess what to do with. The 
profit was all the greater as the son had the luxury of 
differing actively from the father, as well as that of 
actively admiring and, in a splendid sense, on all the 
becoming sides, those of stature, strength and health, 
vividly reproducing him. He had in relation to his 
special gift, his mastery of the dramatic form, a faculty 
of imagination as contracted as that of the author of 
" Monte Cristo" was boundless, but his moral sense 
on the other hand, as distinguished from that of his 
parent, was of the liveliest, was indeed of the most 
special and curious kind. The moral sense of the par- 
nt was to be found only in his good humour and his 
ood health — the moral sense of a musketeer in love, 
his lack of adventurous vision, of the long flight and 
he joy of motion, was in the younger genius quite one 
f the conditions of his strength and luck, of his fine 
ssurance, his sharp edge, his high emphasis, his state 
ntroubled above all by things not within his too ir- 
egularly conditioned ken. The things close about 
im were the things he saw — there were alternatives, 



370 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

differences, opposites, of which he lacked so much as 
the suspicion. Nothing contributes more to the prompt 
fortune of an artist than some such positive and ex- 
clusive temper, the courage of his convictions, as we 
usually call it, the power to neglect something thor- 
oughly, to abound aggressively in his own sense and 
express without reserve his own saturation. The sat- 
uration of the author of "Le Demi-Monde" was never 
far to seek. He was as native to Paris as a nectarine 
to a south wall. He would have fared ill if he had 
not had a great gift and Paris had not been a great 
city. 

It was another element of the happy mixture that 
he came into the world at the moment in all our time 
that was for a man of letters the most amusing and 
beguiling — the moment exactly when he could see the 
end of one era and the beginning of another and join 
hands luxuriously with each. This was an advantage 
to which it would have taken a genius more elastic to 
do full justice, but which must have made him feel 
himself both greatly related and inspiringly free. He 
sprang straight from the lap of full-grown romanti- 
cism; he was a boy, a privileged and initiated youth, 
when his father, when Victor Hugo, when Lamartine 
and Musset and Scribe and Michelet and Balzac and 
George Sand were at the high tide of production. He 
saw them all, knew them all, lived with them and 
made of them his profit, tasting just enough of the 
old concoction to understand the proportions in which 
the new should be mixed. He had above all in his 
father, for the purpose that was in him, a magnificent 
springboard — a background to throw into relief, as a 
ruddy sunset seems to make a young tree doubly bristle, 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 371 

a profile of another type. If it was not indispensable 
it was at any rate quite poetic justice that the succes- 
sor to the name should be, in his conditions, the great 
casuist of the theatre. He had seen the end of an 
age of imagination, he had seen all that could be done 
and shown in the way of mere illustration of the pas- 
sions. That the passions are always with us is a fact 
he had not the smallest pretension to shut his eyes to 
— they were to constitute the almost exclusive subject 
of his study. But he was to study them not for the 
pleasure, the picture, the poetry they offer; he was 
to study them in the interest of something quite out- 
side of them, about which the author of "Antony" 
and "Kean," about which Victor Hugo and Musset, 
Scribe and Balzac and even George Sand had had 
almost nothing to say. He was to study them from 
the point of view of the idea of the right and the 
wrong, of duty and conduct, and he was to this end 
to spend his artistic life with them and give a new 
turn to the theatre. He was in short to become, on 
the basis of a determined observation of the manners 
of his time and country, a professional moralist. 



: 



There can scarcely be a better illustration of differ- 
nces of national habit and attitude than the fact that 
hile among his own people this is the character, as 
an operative force, borne by the author of "Le Demi- 
Monde" and "Les Idees de Madame Aubray," so 
among a couple of others, in the proportion in which 
his reputation there has emerged from the vague, his 
most definite identity is that of a mere painter of in- 
decent people and indecent doings. There are, as I 
have hinted, several reasons for the circumstance al- 
ready noted, the failure of the attempt to domesti- 



372 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

cate him on the English-speaking stage; but one states 
the case fairly, I think, in saying that what accounts 
for half of it is our passion, in the presence of a work 
of art, for confounding the object, as the philosophers 
have it, with the subject, for losing sight of the idea 
in the vehicle, of the intention in the fable. Dumas 
is a dramatist as to whom nine playgoers out of ten 
would precipitately exclaim: "Ah, but you know, 
isn't he dreadfully immoral?" Such are the lions in 
the path of reputation, such the fate, in an alien air, 
of a master whose main reproach in his native clime 
is the importunity and the rigour of his lesson. The 
real difference, I take it, is that whereas we like to be 
good the French like to be better. We like to be 
moral, they like to moralise. This helps us to under- 
stand the number of our innocent writers — writers in- 
nocent even of reflection, a practice of course essentially 
indelicate, inasmuch as it speedily brings us face to 
face with scandal and even with evil. It accounts 
doubtless also for the number of writers on the fur- 
ther side of the Channel who have made the journey 
once for all and to whom, in the dangerous quarter 
they have reached, it appears of the very nature of 
scandal and evil to be inquired about. The whole 
undertaking of such a writer as Dumas is, according 
to his light, to carry a particular, an esthetic form of 
investigation as far as it will stretch — to study, and 
study thoroughly, the bad cases. These bad cases 
were precisely what our managers and adapters, our 
spectators and critics would have nothing to do with. 
It defines indeed the separation that they should have 
been, in the light in which he presented them, pre- 
cisely what made them for his own public exception- 
ally edifying. One of his great contentions is, for 
instance, that seduced girls should under all circum- 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 373 

stances be married — by somebody or other, failing the 
seducer. This is a contention that, as we feel, barely 
concerns us, shut up as we are in the antecedent con- 
viction that they should under no circumstances be se- 
duced. He meets all the cases that, as we see him, we 
feel to have been spread out before him; meets them 
successively, systematically, at once with a great ear- 
nestness and a great wit. He is exuberantly sincere: 
his good faith sometimes obscures his humour, but 
nothing obscures his good faith. So he gives us in 
their order the unworthy brides who must be de- 
nounced, the prenuptial children who must be adopted, 
the natural sons who must be avenged, the wavering 
ladies who must be saved, the credulous fiances who 
must be enlightened, the profligate wives who must be 
shot, the merely blemished ones who must be forgiven, 
the too vindictive ones who must be humoured, the 
venal young men who must be exposed, the unfaithful 
husbands who must be frightened, the frivolous fa- 
thers who must be pulled up and the earnest sons who 
must pull them. To enjoy his manner of dealing with 
such material we must grant him in every connection 
his full premise: that of the importunity of the phe- 
nomenon, the ubiquity of the general plight, the plight 
in which people are left by an insufficient control of their 
passions. We must grant him in fact for his didactic 
and dramatic purpose a great many things. These 
things, taken together and added to some others, con- 
stitute the luxurious terms on which I have spoken of 
him as appearing to the alien admirer to have prac- 
tised his complicated art. 

When we speak of the passions in general we really 
mean, for the most part, the first of the number, the 
most imperious in its action and the most interesting 



374 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 






in its consequences, the passion that unites and di- 
vides the sexes. It is the passion, at any rate, to 
which Dumas as dramatist and pamphleteer mainly 
devoted himself: his plays, his prefaces, his manifestos, 
his few tales roll exclusively on the special relation of 
the man to the woman and the woman to the man, and 
on the dangers of various sorts, even that of ridicule, 
with which this relation surrounds each party. This 
element of danger is what I have called the general 
plight, for when our author considers the sexes as 
united and divided it is with the predominance of the 
division that he is principally struck. It is not an 
unfair account of him to say that life presented itself 
to him almost wholly as a fierce battle between the 
woman and the man. He sides now with one and now 
with the other; the former combatant, in her own 
country, however, was far from pronouncing him sym- 
pathetic. His subject at all events is what we of En- 
glish race call the sexes and what they in France call 
the sex. To talk of love is to talk, as we have it, of 
men and women; to talk of love is, as the French 
have it, to parler jemmes. From every play of our 
author's we receive the impression that to parler jemmes 
is its essential and innermost purpose. It is not as- 
suredly singular that a novelist, a dramatist should 
talk of love, or even should talk of nothing else: what, 
in addition to his adroitness and his penetration, makes 
the position special for Dumas is that he talks of it — 
and in the form of address most associated with pure 
diversion — altogether from the anxious point of view 
of the legislator and the citizen. 

"Diane de Lys," which immediately followed "La 
Dame aux Camelias," is, so far as I can recall it, a 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 375 

picture pure and simple, a pretty story, as we say, 
sufficiently romantic and rather long-winded; but with 
"Le Demi-Monde ,, began his rich argumentative se- 
ries, concluding only the other day with "Denise" and 
"Francillon," the series in which every theme is a 
proposition to be established and every proposition a 
form of duty to be faced. The only variation that I 
can recollect in the list is the disinterested portraiture 
of "Le Pere Prodigue," with its remarkable presenta- 
tion, in the figure of Albertine de la Borde, of vice 
domesticated and thrifty, keeping early hours and 
books in double-entry, and its remarkable illustration, 
I may further add, of all that was the reverse of in- 
fallible in the author's power to distinguish between 
amiable infirmities and ugly ones. The idea on which 
"Le Pere Prodigue" rests belongs more distinctively 
to the world of comedy than almost any other situa- 
tion exhibited in the series; but what are we to say 
of the selection, for comic effect, of a fable of which 
the principal feature is a son's not unfounded suspi- 
cion of the attitude of his own father to his own wife ? 
The father is the image of a nature profusely frivo- 
lous, but we scent something more frivolous still in the 
way his frivolity is disposed of. At the time the play 
was produced the spectator thought himself war- 
ranted in recognising in this picture the personal char- 
acter (certainly not the personal genius) of the elder 
Dumas. If the spectator was so warranted, that only 
helps, I think, to make "Le Pere Prodigue" a stum- 
bling-block for the critic — make it, I mean, an exhibi- 
tion of the author off" his guard and a fact to be taken 
into account in an estimate of his moral reach; a moral 
reach, for the rest, at all events, never impugned by 
any obliquity in facing that conception of the duty 



376 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

imposed which it is the main source of the writer's in- 
terest in the figured circumstances that they may be 
held to impose it, and which he was apt to set forth 
more dogmatically, or at least more excitedly, in an 
occasional and polemical pamphlet. These pamphlets, 
I may parenthetically say, strike me as definitely 
compromising to his character as artist. What shines 
in them most is the appetite for a discussion, or rather 
the appetite for a conclusion, and the passion for a 
simplified and vindictive justice. But I have never 
found it easy to forgive a writer who, in possession of 
a form capable of all sorts of splendid application, 
puts on this resource the slight of using substitutes for 
it at will, as if it is good but for parts of the cause. 
If it is good for anything it is good for the whole dem- 
onstration, and if it is not good for the whole demon- 
stration it is good for nothing — nothing that he is con- 
cerned with. If the picture of life doesn't cover the 
ground what in the world can cover it ? The fault 
can only be the painter's. Woe, in the esthetic line, 
to any example that requires the escort of precept. It 
is like a guest arriving to dine accompanied by con- 
stables. Our author's prefaces and treatises show a 
mistrust of disinterested art. He would have declared 
probably that his art was not disinterested; to which 
our reply would be that it had then no right to put 
us off the scent and prepare deceptions for us by 
coming within an ace of being as good as if it were. 

The merits of the play — that is of the picture, in 
these hands — are sometimes singularly independent of 
the lesson conveyed. The merits of the lesson con- 
veyed are in other cases much more incontestable than 
those of the picture, than the production of the air of 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 377 

life or the happiest observance of the conditions of 
the drama. The conclusion, the prescription, of "De- 
nise" strikes me (to give an instance) as singularly fine, 
but the subject belongs none the less to the hapless 
order of those that fail to profit by the dramatic form 
though they have sacrificed the highest advantages of 
the literary. A play — even the best — pays so tre- 
mendously by what it essentially can not do for the 
comparatively little it practically can, that a mistake 
in the arithmetic of this positive side speedily pro- 
duces a wide deviation. In other words the spectator, 
and still more the reader, sees such a theme as that 
of "Denise," which may be described as the evolu- 
tion of a view, presented most in accordance with its 
nature when the attempt is not made to present it in 
accordance with the nature of the theatre. It is the 
nature of the theatre to give its victims, in exchange 
for melancholy concessions, a vision of the immediate 
not to be enjoyed in any other way; and consequently 
when the material offered it to deal with is not the 
immediate, but the contingent, the derived, the hypo- 
thetic, our melancholy concessions have been made in 
vain and the inadequacy of the form comes out. In 
"Francillon," partly perhaps because the thing has 
nothing to do with anybody's duty — least of all with 
the heroine's, which would be surely to keep off the 
streets — the form happens to be remarkably adequate. 
The question is of the liberty of the protagonist, the 
right of a wronged and indignant wife to work out her 
husband's chastisement in the same material as his 
sin, work it out moreover on the spot, as a blow is 
repaid by a blow, exacting an eye for an eye and a 
tooth for a tooth. The play has all the kinds of life 
that the theatre can achieve, because in the first place 



378 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Dumas, though acting as the wife's advocate, has had 
the intelligence to give us a solution which is only a 
scenic sequence and not a real, still less a "philosophic," 
one; and because in the second it deals with emotions 
and impulses, which can be shown by the short mea- 
sure, and not with reflections and aspirations, which 
can be shown but by the long. 

I am not pretending to take things in turn, but a 
critic with a generous memory of the spell of Dumas 
should not, however pressed, neglect to strain a point 
for "Le Demi-Monde." I doubt my competence, how- 
ever, to consider that admirable work scientifically — I 
find myself too condemned to consider it sentimen- 
tally. A critic is lost, as a critic, from the moment his 
feeling about the worse parts of the matter he investi- 
gates fails to differ materially from his feeling about 
the better. That is an attitude even less enlightened 
than being unconscious of the blemishes; all the same 
it must serve me for the present case. I am perfectly 
aware that Olivier de Jalin is a man of no true deli- 
cacy; in spite of which I take when I see them rep- 
resented the liveliest interest in his proceedings. I am 
perfectly aware that Madame d'Ange, with her calme 
infernal, as George Sand calls it, is tainted and tortu- 
ous; in spite of which my imagination quite warms to 
Madame d'Ange. Perhaps I should indeed rather say 
that this interest and this sympathy have for their 
object the great total of the play. It is the member 
of the series in which Dumas first took up the scales 
in one hand and the sword in the other, and it is a 
wonderful piece of work, wonderful in kind of matu- 
rity, for a man of thirty. It has all the easy ampli- 
tude we call authority. I won't pretend to say what 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 379 

I think, here, of the author's justice, and if I happen 
to think ill of it I won't pretend to care. I see the 
thing through too many old memories, old echoes, old 
charms. In the light of the admirable acting of an- 
cient days, of the faded image of the exquisite Des- 
clee, of a dim recollection even of the prehistoric Rose 
Cheri and of Mademoiselle Delaporte, it represents too 
many of the reasons why I saw him always ideally 
triumphant. To practise an art which for its full, its 
rich effect depended on interpretation, and to be able 
to do one's work with an eye on interpretation of that 
quality — this had in common with supreme bliss the 
element at any rate of being attainable only by the 
elect. It partook of a peace the world cannot give. 
To be a moralist with the aid of Croizette, a philos- 
opher with the aid of Delaunay, an Academician, even, 
with the aid of Bartet — such things suggested an al- 
most equivocal union of virtue and success. One had 
never seen virtue so agreeable to one's self, nor suc- 
cess so useful to others. One had never seen a play 
that was a model so alive in spite of it. Models in 
the theatre were apt to be dead and vivacities vulgar. 
One had never above all seen on the stage a picture 
so conformable to deep pictorial art, a drama so lib- 
erally, gradually, scientifically flushed with its action. 
Beautiful in "Le Demi-Monde" is the way the sub- 
ject quietly, steadily, strongly expands from within. 

It was always the coercive force that his tone gave 
one the strongest sense of life, and it remains the in- 
teresting thing that this element in Dumas abounds 
in spite of not being fed from the source that we usu- 
ally assume to be the richest. It was not fed from the 
imagination, for his imagination, by no means of the 



3 8o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

great plastic sort, has left us a comparatively small 
heritage of typical figures. His characters are all 
pointed by observation, they are clear notes in the 
concert, but not one of them has known the little in- 
visible push that, even when shyly and awkwardly ad- 
ministered, makes the puppet, in spite of the string, 
walk off by himself and quite "cut," if the mood take 
him, that distant relation his creator. They are al- 
ways formal with this personage and thoroughly con- 
scious and proud of him; there is a charm of mys- 
tery and poetry and oddity, a glory of unexpectedness, 
that they consistently lack. Their life, and that, in 
each case, of the whole story (quite the most wonder- 
ful part of this) is simply the author's own life, his 
high vitality, his very presence and temperament and 
voice. They do more for him even than they do for 
the subject, and he himself is at last accordingly the 
most vivid thing in every situation. He keeps it at 
arm's length because he has the instinct of the drama- 
tist and the conscience of the artist, but we feel all the 
while that his face is bigger than his mask. Nothing 
about his work is more extraordinary than this man- 
ner in which his personality pervades without spoiling 
it the most detached and most impersonal of literary 
forms. The reasons for such an impunity are first 
that his precautions, the result of a great intelligence, 
were so effective, and second that his personality, the 
result of a great affiliation, was so robust. It may be 
said that the precautions were not effective if the 
man himself was what one most enjoyed in the play. 
The only answer to that can be that I speak merely 
for myself and for the fresher sensibility of the happy 
time. Other admirers found certainly other things; 
what I found most was a tall figure in muscular mo- 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 381 

tion and the sense of a character that had made ad- 
mirably free with life. If it was mainly as an un- 
abashed observer that he had made free, and if the 
life supplied was much of it uncommonly queer, that 
never diminished the action of his hard masculinity 
and his fine intellectual brutality. There was an easy 
competence in it all, and a masterful experience, and 
a kind of vicarious courage. In particular there was a 
real genius for putting all persons — especially all bad 
ones — very much in their place. Then it was all, for 
another bribe, so copious and so close, so sustained 
and so quiet, with such fascinating unities and com- 
plex simplicities and natural solutions. It was the 
breath of the world and the development of an art. 

All the good, however, that I recollect thinking of 
Dumas only reminds me how little I desired that my 
remarks in general should lead me into vain discrim- 
inations. There are some indeed that are not vain — 
at least they help us to understand. He has a noble 
strain of force, a fulness of blood that has permitted 
him to be tapped without shrinking. We must speak 
of him in the present tense, as we always speak of the 
masters. The theatre of his time, wherever it has 
been serious, has on the ground of general method 
lived on him; wherever it has not done so it has not 
lived at all. To pretend to be too shocked to profit 
by him was a way of covering up its levity, but there 
was no escaping its fate. He was the kind of artistic 
influence that is as inevitable as a medical specific: 
you may decline it from black bottle to-day — you will 
take it from a green bottle to-morrow. The energy 
that went forth blooming as Dumas has come back 
grizzled as Ibsen, and would under the latter form, I 



382 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

am sure, very freely acknowledge its debt. A critic 
whose words meet my eyes as I write very justly says 
that: "Just as we have the novel before Balzac and 
the novel after Balzac, the poetry that preceded Victor 
Hugo and the poetry that followed him, so we have 
the drama before Alexandre Dumas and the drama 
after him." He has left his strong hand upon it; he 
remodelled it as a vehicle, he refreshed it as an art. 
His passion for it was obviously great, but there would 
be a high injustice to him in not immediately adding 
that his interest in the material it dealt with, in his 
subject, his question, his problem, was greater still 
than this joy of the craftsman. That might well be, 
but there are celebrated cases in which it has not 
been. The largest quality in Dumas was his immense 
concern about life — his sense of human character and 
human fate as commanding and controllable things. 
To do something on their behalf was paramount for 
him, and what to do in his own case clear: what else 
but act upon the conscience as violently as he could, 
and with the remarkable weapons that Providence had 
placed within his grasp and for which he was to show 
his gratitude by a perfectly intrepid application ? 
These weapons were three: a hard rare wit, not lam- 
bent like a flame, but stiff and straight like an arrow 
from a crossbow; a perception not less rare of some 
of the realities of the particular human tendency about 
which most falsities have clustered; and lastly that 
native instinct for the conditions of dramatic presen- 
tation without which any attempt to meet them is a 
helpless groping. 

It must always be remembered of him that he was 
the observer of a special order of things, the moralist 



DUMAS THE YOUNGER 383 

of a particular relation as the umpire of a yacht-race 
is the legislator of a particular sport. His vision and 
his talent, as I have said, were all for the immediate, 
for the manners and the practices he himself was 
drenched with: he had none of the faculty that scents 
from afar, that wings away and dips beyond the hori- 
zon. There are moments when a reader not of his 
own race feels that he simplifies almost absurdly. 
There are too many things he didn't after all guess, 
too many cases he didn't after all provide for. He 
has a certain odour of bad company that almost im- 
perils his distinction. This was doubtless the deep- 
est of the reasons why among ourselves he flourished 
so scantly: we felt ourselves to be of a world in which 
the elements were differently mixed, the proportions 
differently marked, so that the tables of our law would 
have to be differently graven. His very earnestness 
was only a hindrance — he might have had more to 
say to us if he had consented to have less application. 
This produced the curious dryness, the obtrusive econ- 
omy of his drama — the hammered sharpness of every 
outline, the metallic ring of every sound. His ter- 
rible knowledge suggested a kind of uniform — gilt but- 
tons, a feathered hat and a little official book; it was 
almost like an irruption of the police. The most gen- 
eral masters are the poets, with all the things they 
blessedly don't hold for so very certain and all the 
things they blessedly and preferably invent. It is 
true that Dumas was splendid, in his way, exactly 
because he was not vague: his concentration, all con- 
fidence and doctrine and epigram, is the explanation of 
his extraordinary force. That force is his abiding 
quality: one feels that he was magnificently a man — 
that he stands up high and sees straight and speaks 



384 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

loud. It is his great temperament, undiminished by 
what it lacks, that endears him to his admirers. It 
made him still of the greater race and played well its 
part in its time — so well that one thinks of him finally 
as perhaps not, when all is said, of the very happiest 
group, the group of those for whom in the general af- 
fection there is yet more to come. He had an im- 
mense reverberation — he practised the art that makes 
up for being the most difficult by being the most ac- 
claimed. There is no postponed poetic justice for 
those who have had everything. He was seconded in 
a manner that must have made success a double de- 
light. There are indications that the dramatist of the 
future will be less and less elated. He may well be- 
come so if he is to see himself less and less interpreted. 



THE NOVEL IN "THE RING AND THE 

BOOK" 1 

1912 

If on such an occasion as this — even with our natural 
impulse to shake ourselves free of reserves — some sharp 
choice between the dozen different aspects of one of 
the most copious of our poets becomes a prime neces- 
sity, though remaining at the same time a great diffi- 
culty, so in respect to the most voluminous of his 
works the admirer is promptly held up, as we have 
come to call it; finds himself almost baffled by alter- 
natives. "The Ring and the Book" is so vast and so 
essentially gothic a structure, spreading and soaring 
and branching at such a rate, covering such ground, 
putting forth such pinnacles and towers and brave ex- 
crescences, planting its transepts and chapels and por- 
ticos, its clustered hugeness or inordinate muchness, 
that with any first approach we but walk vaguely and 
slowly, rather bewilderedly, round and round it, won- 
dering at what point we had best attempt such en- 
trance as will save our steps and light our uncertainty, 
most enable us to reach our personal chair, our indi- 
cated chapel or shrine, when once within. For it is to 
be granted that to this inner view the likeness of the 
literary monument to one of the great religious gives 

Address delivered before the Academic Committee of the Royal Society 
of Literature in Commemoration of the Centenary of Robert Browning, 
May 7, 1912. 

38s 



386 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 






way a little, sustains itself less than in the first, the 
affronting mass; unless we simply figure ourselves, 
under the great roof, looking about us through a splen- 
did thickness and dimness of air, an accumulation of 
spiritual presences or unprofaned mysteries, that makes 
our impression heavily general — general only — and 
leaves us helpless for reporting on particulars. The 
particulars for our purpose have thus their identity 
much rather in certain features of the twenty faces — 
either of one or of another of these — that the struc- 
ture turns to the outer day and that we can, as it 
were, sit down before and consider at our comparative 
ease. I say comparative advisedly, for I cling to the 
dear old tradition that Browning is "difficult" — which 
we were all brought up on and which I think we should, 
especially on a rich retrospective day like this, with 
the atmosphere of his great career settling upon us as 
much as possible, feel it a shock to see break down 
in too many places at once. Selecting my ground, by 
your kind invitation, for sticking in and planting be- 
fore you, to flourish so far as it shall, my little sprig 
of bay, I have of course tried to measure the quantity 
of ease with which our material may on that noted 
spot allow itself to be treated. There are innumer- 
able things in "The Ring and the Book" — as the 
comprehensive image I began with makes it needless 
I should say; and I have been above all appealed to 
by the possibility that one of these, pursued for a 
while through the labyrinth, but at last overtaken and 
then more or less confessing its identity, might have 
yielded up its best essence as a grateful theme under 
some fine strong economy of prose treatment. So here 
you have me talking at once of prose and seeking 
that connection to help out my case. 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 387 

From far back, from my first reading of these vol- 
umes, which took place at the time of their disclosure 
to the world, when I was a fairly young person, the 
sense, almost the pang, of the novel they might have 
constituted sprang sharply from them; so that I was 
to go on through the years almost irreverently, all but 
quite profanely if you will, thinking of the great loose 
and uncontrolled composition, the great heavy-hanging 
cluster of related but unreconciled parts, as a fiction 
of the so-called historic type, that is as a suggested 
study of the manners and conditions from which our 
own have more or less traceably issued, just tragically 
spoiled — or as a work of art, in other words, smoth- 
ered in the producing. To which I hasten to add my 
consciousness of the scant degree in which such a 
fresh start from our author's documents, such a re- 
projection of them, wonderful documents as they can 
only have been, may claim a critical basis. Conceive 
me as simply astride of my different fancy, my other 
dream, of the matter — which bolted with me, as I have 
said, at the first alarm. 

Browning worked in this connection literally upon 
documents; no page of his long story is more vivid and 
splendid than that of his find of the Book in the litter 
of a market-stall in Florence and the swoop of prac- 
tised perception with which he caught up in it a trea- 
sure. Here was a subject stated to the last ounce of 
its weight, a living and breathing record of facts pitiful 
and terrible, a mass of matter bristling with revela- 
tions and yet at the same time wrapped over with 
layer upon layer of contemporary appreciation; which 
appreciation, in its turn, was a part of the wealth to 
be appreciated. What our great master saw was his 



388 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

situation founded, seated there in positively packed 
and congested significance, though by just so much as 
it was charged with meanings and values were those 
things undeveloped and unexpressed. They looked up 
at him, even in that first flush and from their market- 
stall, and said to him, in their compressed compass, as 
with the muffled rumble of a slow-coming earthquake, 
"Express us, express us, immortalise us as we'll im- 
mortalise your'' — so that the terms of the understand- 
ing were so far cogent and clear. It was an under- 
standing, on their side, with the poet; and since that 
poet had produced "Men and Women," "Dramatic 
Lyrics,'' "Dramatis Personae" and sundry plays — we 
needn't even foist on him "Sordello" — he could but 
understand in his own way. That way would have 
had to be quite some other, we fully see, had he been 
by habit and profession not just the lyric, epic, dra- 
matic commentator, the extractor, to whatever essen- 
tial potency and redundancy, of the moral of the fable, 
but the very fabulist himself, the inventor and pro- 
jector, layer down of the postulate and digger of the 
foundation. I doubt if we have a precedent for this 
energy of appropriation of a deposit of stated matter, 
a block of sense already in position and requiring not 
to be shaped and squared and caused any further to 
solidify, but rather to suffer disintegration, be pulled 
apart, melted down, hammered, by the most char- 
acteristic of the poet's processes, to powder — dust of 
gold and silver, let us say. He was to apply to it his 
favourite system — that of looking at his subject from 
the point of view of a curiosity almost sublime in its 
freedom, yet almost homely in its method, and of 
smuggling as many more points of view together into 
that one as the fancy might take him to smuggle, on 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 389 

a scale on which even he had never before applied it; 
this with a courage and a confidence that, in presence of 
all the conditions, conditions many of them arduous 
and arid and thankless even to defiance, we can only 
pronounce splendid, and of which the issue was to be 
of a proportioned monstrous magnificence. 

The one definite forecast for this product would 
have been that it should figure for its producer as a 
poem — as if he had simply said, "I embark at any rate 
for the Golden Isles"; everything else was of the pure 
incalculable, the frank voyage of adventure. To what 
extent the Golden Isles were in fact to be reached is a 
matter we needn't pretend, I think, absolutely to de- 
termine; let us feel for ourselves and as we will about 
it — either see our adventurer, disembarked bag and 
baggage and in possession, plant his flag on the highest 
eminence within his circle of sea, or, on the other hand, 
but watch him approach and beat back a little, tack 
and turn and stand off, always fairly in sight of land, 
catching rare glimpses and meeting strange airs, but 
not quite achieving the final coup that annexes the 
group. He returns to us under either view all scented 
and salted with his measure of contact, and that for 
the moment is enough for us — more than enough for 
me at any rate, engaged for your beguilement in this 
practical relation of snuffing up what he brings. He 
brings, however one puts it, a detailed report, which is 
but another word for a story; and it is with his story, 
his offered, not his borrowed one — a very different 
matter — that I am concerned. We are probably most 
of us so aware of its general content that if I sum this 
up I may do so briefly. The Book of the Florentine 
rubbish-heap is the full account (as full accounts were 



39 o NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

conceived in those days) of the trial before the Roman 
courts, with inquiries and judgments by the Tuscan 
authorities intermixed, of a certain Count Guido Fran- 
ceschini of Arezzo, decapitated, in company with four 
confederates — these latter hanged — on February 22, 
1698, for the murder of his young wife Pompilia Com- 
parini and her ostensible parents, Pietro and Violante 
of that ilk. 

The circumstances leading to this climax were pri- 
marily his marriage to Pompilia, some years before, in 
Rome — she being then but in her thirteenth year — 
under the impression, fostered in him by the elder pair, 
that she was their own child and on this head heiress 
to moneys settled on them from of old in the event of 
their having a child. They had in fact had none, and 
had, in substitution, invented, so to speak, Pompilia, 
the luckless base-born baby of a woman of lamentable 
character easily induced to part with her for cash. 
They bring up the hapless creature as their daughter, 
and as their daughter they marry her, in Rome, to the 
middle-aged and impecunious Count Guido, a rapa- 
cious and unscrupulous fortune-seeker by whose su- 
perior social position, as we say, dreadfully decaduto 
though he be, they are dazzled out of all circumspec- 
tion. The girl, innocent, ignorant, bewildered, scared 
and purely passive, is taken home by her husband to 
Arezzo, where she is at first attended by Pietro and 
Violante and where the direst disappointment await 
the three. Count Guido proves the basest of men and 
his home a place of terror and of torture, from which at 
the age of seventeen, and shortly prior to her giving 
birth to an heir to the house, such as it is, she is res- 
cued by a pitying witness of her misery, Canon Capon- 






"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 391 

sacchi, a man of the world and adorning it, yet in holy 
orders, as men of the world in Italy might then be, who 
clandestinely helps her, at peril of both their lives, back 
to Rome, and of whom it is attested that he has had 
no other relation with her but this of distinguished and 
all-disinterested friend in need. The pretended parents 
have at an early stage thrown up their benighted game, 
fleeing from the rigour of their dupe's domestic rule, 
disclosing to him vindictively the part they have played 
and the consequent failure of any profit to him through 
his wife, and leaving him in turn to wreak his spite, 
which has become infernal, on the wretched Pompilia. 
He pursues her to Rome, on her eventual flight, and 
overtakes her, with her companion, just outside the 
gates; but having, by the aid of the local powers, re- 
achieved possession of her, he contents himself for the 
time with procuring her sequestration in a convent, 
from which, however, she is presently allowed to emerge 
in view of the near birth of her child. She rejoins 
Pietro and Violante, devoted to her, oddly enough, 
through all their folly and fatuity; and under their 
roof, in a lonely Roman suburb, her child comes into 
the world. Her husband meanwhile, hearing of her 
release, gives way afresh to the fury that had not at 
the climax of his former pursuit taken full effect; he 
recruits a band of four of his young tenants or farm- 
labourers and makes his way, armed, like his com- 
panions, with knives, to the door behind which three 
of the parties to all the wrong done him, as he holds, 
then lurk. He pronounces, after knocking and wait- 
ing, the name of Caponsacchi; upon which, as the 
door opens, Violante presents herself. He stabs her 
to death on the spot with repeated blows — like her 
companions she is off her guard; and he throws him- 






392 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

self on each of these with equal murderous effect. 
Pietro, crying for mercy, falls second beneath him; 
after which he attacks his wife, whom he literally 
hacks to death. She survives, by a miracle, long 
enough, in spite of all her wounds, to testify; which 
testimony, as may be imagined, is not the least pre- 
cious part of the case. Justice is on the whole, though 
deprecated and delayed, what we call satisfactory; the 
last word is for the Pope in person, Innocent XII. 
Pignatelli, at whose deliberation, lone and supreme, 
on Browning's page, we splendidly assist; and Count 
Guido and his accomplices, bloodless as to the act 
though these appear to have been, meet their dis- 
criminated doom. 

That is the bundle of facts, accompanied with the 
bundle of proceedings, legal, ecclesiastical, diplomatic 
and other, on the facts, that our author, of a sum- 
mer's day, made prize of; but our general tempta- 
tion, as I say — out of which springs this question of 
the other values of character and effect, the other 
completeness of picture and drama, that the confused 
whole might have had for us — is a distinctly differ- 
ent thing. The difference consists, you see, to begin 
with, in the very breath of our poet's genius, already, 
and so inordinately, at play on them from the first 
of our knowing them. And it consists in the second 
place of such an extracted sense of the whole, which 
becomes, after the most extraordinary fashion, bigger 
by the extraction, immeasurably bigger than even the 
most cumulative weight of the mere crude evidence, 
that our choice of how to take it all is in a manner 
determined for us: we can only take it as tremen- 
dously interesting, interesting not only in itself but 






"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 393 

with the great added interest, the dignity and au- 
thority and beauty, of Browning's general perception 
of it. We can't not accept this, and little enough on 
the whole do we want not to: it sees us, with its tre- 
mendous push, that of its poetic, esthetic, historic, 
psychologic shoulder (one scarce knows how to name 
it), so far on our way. Yet all the while we are in 
presence not at all of an achieved form, but of a mere 
preparation for one, though on the hugest scale; so 
that, you see, we are no more than decently atten- 
tive with our question: "Which of them all, of the 
various methods of casting the wondrously mixed 
metal, is he, as he goes, preparing?" Well, as he 
keeps giving and giving, in immeasurable plenty, it is 
in our selection from it all and our picking it over that 
we seek, and to whatever various and unequal effect 
find, our account. He works over his vast material, 
and we then work him over, though not availing our- 
selves, to this end, of a grain he himself doesn't some- 
how give us; and there we are. 

I admit that my faith in my particular contention 
would be a degree firmer and fonder if there didn't 
glimmer through our poet's splendid hocus-pocus just 
the hint of one of those flaws that sometimes deform 
the fair face of a subject otherwise generally appeal- 
ing or promising — of such a subject in especial as may 
have been submitted to us, possibly even with the 
pretension to impose it, in too complete a shape. The 
idea but half hinted — when it is a very good one — 
is apt to contain the germ of happier fruit than the 
freight of the whole branch, waved at us or dropped 
into our lap, very often proves. This happens when 
we take over, as the phrase is, established data, take 



394 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

them over from existing records and under some in- 
volved obligation to take them as they stand. That 
drawback rests heavily for instance on the so-called 
historic fiction — so beautiful a case it is of a muddle- 
ment of terms — and is just one of the eminent reasons 
why the embarrassed Muse of that form, pulled up 
again and again, and the more often the fine intelli- 
gence invokes her, by the need of a superior harmony 
which shall be after all but a superior truth, catches 
up her flurried skirts and makes her saving dash for 
some gap in the hedge of romance. Now the flaw on 
this so intensely expressive face, that of the general 
donnee of the fate of Pompilia, is that amid the va- 
riety of forces at play about her the unity of the sit- 
uation isn't, by one of those large straight ideal ges- 
tures on the part of the Muse, handed to us at a stroke. 
The question of the whereabouts of the unity of a 
group of data subject to be wrought together into a 
thing of art, the question in other words of the point 
at which the various implications of interest, no mat- 
ter how many, most converge and interfuse, becomes 
always, by my sense of the affair, quite the first to be 
answered; for according to the answer shapes and fills 
itself the very vessel of that beauty — the beauty, ex- 
actly, of interest, of maximum interest, which is the 
ultimate extract of any collocation of facts, any pic- 
ture of life, and the finest aspect of any artistic work. 
Call a novel a picture of life as much as we will; call 
it, according to one of our recent fashions, a slice, or 
even a chunk, even a "bloody" chunk, of life, a rough 
excision from that substance as superficially cut and 
as summarily served as possible, it still fails to escape 
this exposure to appreciation, or in other words to 
criticism, that it has had to be selected, selected under 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 395 

some sense for something; and the unity of the exhi- 
bition should meet us, does meet us if the work be 
done, at the point at which that sense is most patent. 
If the slice or the chunk, or whatever we call it, if it 
isn't "done," as we say — and as it so often declines 
to be — the work itself of course isn't likely to be; and 
there we may dismiss it. 

The first thing we do is to cast about for some cen- 
tre in our field; seeing that, for such a purpose as 
ours, the subject might very nearly go a-begging with 
none more definite than the author has provided for 
it. I find that centre in the embracing consciousness 
of Caponsacchi, which, coming to the rescue of our 
question of treatment, of our search for a point of 
control, practically saves everything, and shows itself 
moreover the only thing that can save. The more 
we ask of any other part of our picture that it shall 
exercise a comprehensive function, the more we see 
that particular part inadequate; as inadequate even 
in the extraordinarily magnified range of spirit and 
reach of intelligence of the atrocious Franceschini as 
in the sublime passivity and plasticity of the childish 
Pompilia, educated to the last point though she be 
indeed by suffering, but otherwise so untaught that 
she can neither read nor write. The magnified state 
is in this work still more than elsewhere the note of 
the intelligence, of any and every faculty of thought, im- 
puted by our poet to his creatures; and it takes a great 
mind, one of the greatest, we may at once say, to make 
these persons express and confess themselves to such 
an effect of intellectual splendour. He resorts prima- 
rily to their sense, their sense of themselves and of 
everything else they know, to exhibit them, and has 






396 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

for this purpose to keep them, and to keep them per- 
sistently and inexhaustibly, under the fixed lens of his 
prodigious vision. He thus makes out in them bound- 
less treasures of truth — truth even when it happens 
to be, as in the case of Count Guido, but a shining 
wealth of constitutional falsity. Of the extent to 
which he may after this fashion unlimitedly draw upon 
them his exposure of Count Guido, which goes on and 
on, though partly, I admit, by repeating itself, is a 
wondrous example. It is not too much to say of Pom- 
pilia — Pompilia pierced with twenty wounds, Pompilia 
on her death-bed, Pompilia but seventeen years old 
and but a fortnight a mother — that she acquires an 
intellectual splendour just by the fact of the vast cov- 
ering charity of imagination with which her recording, 
our commemorated, avenger, never so as in this case 
an avenger of the wronged beautiful things of life, 
hangs over and breathes upon her. We see her come 
out to him, and the extremely remarkable thing is 
that we see it, on the whole, without doubting that it 
might just have been. Nothing could thus be more 
interesting, however it may at moments and in places 
puzzle us, than the impunity, on our poet's part, of 
most of these overstretchings of proportion, these vio- 
lations of the immediate appearance. Browning is 
deep down below the immediate with the first step 
of his approach; he has vaulted over the gate, is al- 
ready far afield and never, so long as we watch him, 
has occasion to fall back. We wonder, for, after all, 
the real is his quest, the very ideal of the real, the 
real most finely mixed with life, which is in the last 
analysis the ideal; and we know, with our dimmer 
vision, no such reality as a Franceschini fighting for 
his life, fighting for the vindication of his baseness, 
embodying his squalor, with an audacity of wit, an 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 397 

intensity of colour, a variety of speculation and illus- 
tration, that represent well-nigh the maximum play 
of the human mind. It is in like sort scarce too much 
to say of the exquisite Pompilia that on her part in- 
telligence and expression are disengaged to a point at 
which the angels may well begin to envy her; and all 
again without our once wincing so far as our consist- 
ently liking to see and hear and believe is concerned. 
Caponsacchi regales us, of course, with the rarest fruit 
of a great character, a great culture and a great case; 
but Caponsacchi is acceptedly and naturally, need- 
fully and illustratively, splendid. He is the soul of 
man at its finest — having passed through the smoky 
fires of life and emerging clear and high. Greatest of 
all the spirits exhibited, however, is that of the more 
than octogenarian Pope, at whose brooding, ponder- 
ing, solitary vigil, by the end of a hard grey winter 
day in the great bleak waiting Vatican — "in the plain 
closet where he does such work" — we assist as inti- 
mately as at every other step of the case, and on 
whose grand meditation we heavily hang. But the 
Pope strikes us at first — though indeed perhaps only 
at first — as too high above the whole connection func- 
tionally and historically for us to place him within it 
dramatically. Our novel faces provisionally the ques- 
tion of dispensing with him, as it dispenses with the 
amazing, bristling, all too indulgently presented Roman 
advocates on either side of the case, who combine to 
put together the most formidable monument we pos- 
sess to Browning's active curiosity and the liveliest 
proof of his almost unlimited power to give on his 
readers' nerves without giving on his own. 

What remains with us all this time, none the less, 
is the effect of magnification, the exposure of each of 



398 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

these figures, in its degree, to that iridescent wash of 
personality, of temper and faculty, that our author 
ladles out to them, as the copious share of each, from 
his own great reservoir of spiritual health, and which 
makes us, as I have noted, seek the reason of a per- 
petual anomaly. Why, bristling so with references to 
him rather than with references to each other or to 
any accompanying set of circumstances, do they still 
establish more truth and beauty than they sacrifice, 
do they still, according to their chance, help to make 
"The Ring and the Book" a great living thing, a 
great objective mass ? I brushed by the answer a mo- 
ment ago, I think, in speaking of the development in 
Pompilia of the resource of expression, which brings 
us round, it seems to me, to the justification of Brown- 
ing's method. To express his inner self — his outward 
was a different affair ! — and to express it utterly, even 
if no matter how, was clearly, for his own measure 
and consciousness of that inner self, to be poetic; and 
the solution of all the deviations and disparities or, 
speaking critically, monstrosities, in the mingled tissue 
of this work, is the fact that whether or no by such 
convulsions of soul and sense life got delivered for 
him, the garment of life (which for him was poetry 
and poetry alone) got disposed in its due and ade- 
quate multitudinous folds. We move with him but 
in images and references and vast and far correspond- 
ences; we eat but of strange compounds and drink but 
of rare distillations; and very soon, after a course of 
this, we feel ourselves, however much or however little 
to our advantage we may on occasion pronounce it, 
in the world of Expression at any cost. That, essen- 
tially, is the world of poetry — which in the cases known 
to our experience where it seems to us to differ from 






"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 399 

Browning's world does so but through this latter's 
having been, by the vigour and violence, the bold 
familiarity, of his grasp and pull at it, moved several 
degrees nearer us, so to speak, than any other of the 
same general sort with which we are acquainted; so 
that, intellectually, we back away from it a little, back 
down before it, again and again, as we try to get off 
from a picture or a group or a view which is too much 
upon us and thereby out of focus. Browning is "upon " 
us, straighter upon us always, somehow, than anyone 
else of his race; and we thus recoil, we push our chair 
back, from the table he so tremendously spreads, just 
to see a little better what is on it. This makes a 
relation with him that it is difficult to express; as if 
he came up against us, each time, on the same side 
of the street and not on the other side, across the 
way, where we mostly see the poets elegantly walk, 
and where we greet them without danger of concussion. 
It is on this same side, as I call it, on our side, on 
the other hand, that I rather see our encounter with 
the novelists taking place; we being, as it were, more 
mixed with them, or they at least, by their desire and 
necessity, more mixed with us, and our brush of them, 
in their minor frenzy, a comparatively muffled en- 
counter. 

We have in the whole thing, at any rate, the ele- 
ment of action which is at the same time constant pic- 
ture, and the element of picture which is at the same 
time constant action; and with a fusion, as the mass 
moves, that is none the less effective, none the less 
thick and complete, from our not owing it in the 
least to an artful economy. Another force pushes its 
way through the waste and rules the scene, making 



4 oo NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

wrong things right and right things a hundred times 
more so — that breath of Browning's own particular 
matchless Italy which takes us full in the face and 
remains from the first the felt rich coloured air in 
which we live. The quantity of that atmosphere that 
he had to give out is like nothing else in English poetry, 
any more than in English prose, that I recall; and 
since I am taking these liberties with him, let me 
take one too, a little, with the fruit of another genius 
shining at us here in association — with that great 
placed and timed prose fiction which we owe to George 
Eliot and in which her projection of the stage and 
scenery is so different a matter. Curious enough this 
difference where so many things make for identity — 
the quantity of talent, the quantity of knowledge, the 
high equality (or almost) of culture and curiosity, not 
to say of "spiritual life." Each writer drags along a 
far-sweeping train, though indeed Browning's spreads 
so considerably furthest; but his stirs up, to my vision, 
a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in "Romola," 
by contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as 
white, and withal about as cold, as before she had 
benevolently entered it. This straight saturation of 
our author's, this prime assimilation of the elements for 
which the name of Italy stands, is a single splendid 
case, however; I can think of no second one that is 
not below it — if we take it as supremely expressed in 
those of his lyrics and shorter dramatic monologues 
that it has most helped to inspire. The Rome and 
Tuscany of the early 'fifties had become for him so 
at once a medium, a bath of the senses and percep- 
tions, into which he could sink, in which he could 
unlimitedly soak, that wherever he might be touched 
afterwards he gave out some effect of that immersion. 






"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 401 

This places him to my mind quite apart, makes the 
rest of our poetic record of a similar experience com- 
paratively pale and abstract. Shelley and Swinburne 
— to name only his compeers — are, I know, a part of 
the record; but the author of "Men and Women," 
of "Pippa Passes," of certain of the Dramatic Lyrics 
and other scattered felicities, not only expresses and 
reflects the matter; he fairly, he heatedly, if I may 
use such a term, exudes and perspires it. Shelley, let 
us say in the connection, is a light and Swinburne, let 
us say, a sound; Browning alone of them all is a tem- 
perature. We feel it, we are in it at a plunge, with 
the very first pages of the thing before us; to which, 
I confess, we surrender with a momentum drawn from 
fifty of their predecessors, pages not less sovereign, 
elsewhere. 

The old Florence of the late spring closes round us; 
the hand of Italy is at once, with the recital of the 
old-world litter of Piazza San Lorenzo, with that of 
the great glare and of the great shadow-masses, heavy 
upon us, heavy with that strange weight, that mixed 
pressure, which is somehow, to the imagination, at 
once a caress and a menace. Our poet kicks up on the 
spot and at short notice what I have called his cloud 
of gold-dust. I can but speak for myself at least — 
something that I want to feel both as historic and 
esthetic truth, both as pictorial and moral interest, 
something that will repay my fancy tenfold if I can 
but feel it, hovers before me, and I say to myself that, 
whether or no a great poem is to come off, I will be 
hanged if one of the vividest of all stories and one of 
the sharpest of all impressions doesn't. I beckon these 
things on, I follow them up, I so desire and need them 



4 o2 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

that I of course, by my imaginative collaboration, 
contribute to them — from the moment, that is, of my 
finding myself really in relation to the great points. 
On the other hand, as certainly, it has taken the au- 
thor of the first volume, and of the two admirable 
chapters of the same — since I can't call them cantos — 
entitled respectively "Half-Rome" and "The Other 
Half-Rome," to put me in relation; where it is that 
he keeps me more and more, letting the closeness of 
my state, it must be owned, occasionally drop, letting 
the finer call on me even, for bad quarters-of-an-hour, 
considerably languish, but starting up before me again 
in vivid authority if I really presume to droop or 
stray. He takes his wilful way with me, but I make 
it my own, picking over and over as I have said, like 
some lingering talking pedlar's client, his great un- 
loosed pack; and thus it is that by the time I am 
settled with Pompilia at Arezzo I have lived into all 
the conditions. They press upon me close, those won- 
derful dreadful beautiful particulars of the Italy of the 
eve of the eighteenth century — Browning himself mov- 
ing about, darting hither and thither in them, at his 
mighty ease: beautiful, I say, because of the quan- 
tity of romantic and esthetic tradition from a more 
romantic and esthetic age still visibly, palpably, in 
solution there; and wonderful and dreadful through 
something of a similar tissue of matchless and ruth- 
less consistencies and immoralities. I make to my 
hand, as this infatuated reader, my Italy of the eve 
of the eighteenth century — a vast painted and gilded 
rococo shell roofing over a scenic, an amazingly fig- 
ured and furnished earth, but shutting out almost the 
whole of our own dearly-bought, rudely-recovered spir- 
itual sky. You see I have this right, all the while, 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 403 

if I recognise my suggested material, which keeps 
coming and coming in the measure of my need, and 
my duty to which is to recognise it, and as hand- 
somely and actively as possible. The great thing is 
that I have such a group of figures moving across so 
constituted a scene — figures so typical, so salient, so 
reeking with the old-world character, so impressed all 
over with its manners and its morals, and so predes- 
tined, we see, to this particular horrid little drama. 
And let me not be charged with giving it away, the 
idea of the latent prose fiction, by calling it little 
and horrid; let me not — for with my contention I 
can't possibly afford to — appear to agree with those 
who speak of the Franceschini-Comparini case as a 
mere vulgar criminal anecdote. 

It might have been such but for two reasons — 
counting only the principal ones; one of these our 
fact that we see it so, I repeat, in Browning's inor- 
dinately-coloured light, and the other — which is in- 
deed perhaps but another face of the same — that, 
with whatever limitations, it gives us in the rarest 
manner three characters of the first importance. I 
hold three a great many; I could have done with it 
almost, I think, if there had been but one or two; 
our rich provision shows you at any rate what I mean 
by speaking of our author's performance as above all 
a preparation for something. Deeply he felt that with 
the three — the three built up at us each with an equal 
genial rage of reiterative touches — there couldn't even- 
tually not be something done (artistically done, I 
mean) if someone would only do it. There they are 
in their old yellow Arezzo, that miniature milder 
Florence, as sleepy to my recollection as a little En- 



4 o 4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

glish cathedral city clustered about a Close, but dream- 
ing not so peacefully nor so innocently; there is the 
great fretted fabric of the Church on which they are 
all swarming and grovelling, yet after their fashion 
interesting parasites, from the high and dry old Arch- 
bishop, meanly wise or ignobly edifying, to whom 
Pompilia resorts in her woe and who practically pushes 
her away with a shuffling velvet foot; down through 
the couple of Franceschini cadets, Canon Girolamo 
and Abate Paul, mere minions, fairly in the vermin- 
ous degree, of the overgrown order or too-rank organ- 
ism; down to Count Guido himself and to Canon 
Caponsacchi, who have taken the tonsure at the 
outset of their careers, but none too strictly the vows, 
and who lead their lives under some strangest pro- 
fanest pervertedest clerical category. There have been 
before this the Roman preliminaries, the career of the 
queer Comparini, the adoption, the assumption of the 
parentship, of the ill-starred little girl, with the sor- 
did cynicism of her marriage out of hand, conveying 
her presumptive little fortune, her poor handful of 
even less than contingent cash, to hungry middle- 
aged Count Guido's stale "rank"; the many-toned 
note or turbid harmony of all of which recurs to us 
in the vivid image of the pieties and paganisms of 
San Lorenzo in Lucina, that banal little church in the 
old upper Corso — banal, that is, at the worst, with 
the rare Roman banalite; bravely banal, or banal 
with style — that we have all passed with a sense of 
its reprieve to our sight-seeing, and where the bleed- 
ing bodies of the still-breathing Pompilia and her ex- 
tinct companions are laid out on the greasy marble 
of the altar-steps. To glance at these things, how- 
ever, is fairly to be tangled, and at once, in the au- 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 405 

thor's complexity of suggestion, to which our own 
thick-coming fancies respond in no less a measure; 
so that I have already missed my time to so much 
even as name properly the tremendous little chapter 
we should have devoted to the Franceschini interior 
as revealed at last to Comparini eyes; the sinister 
scene or ragged ruin of the Aretine "palace," where 
pride and penury and, at once, rabid resentment show 
their teeth in the dark and the void, and where Pom- 
pilia's inspired little character, clear silver hardened, 
effectually beaten and battered, to steel, begins to 
shine at the blackness with a light that fairly outfaces 
at last the gleam of wolfish fangs — the character that 
draws from Guido, in his, alas, too boundless harangue 
of the fourth volume, some of the sharpest specifica- 
tions into which that extraordinary desert, that inde- 
scribable waste of intellectual life, as I have hinted 
at its being, from time to time flowers. 

"None of your abnegation of revenge! 
Fly at me frank, tug where I tear again ! 
Away with the empty stare ! Be holy still, 
And stupid ever ! Occupy your patch 
Of private snow that's somewhere in what world 
May now be growing icy round your head, 
And aguish at your foot-print — freeze not me!" 

I have spoken of the enveloping consciousness — or 
call it just the struggling, emerging, comparing, at last 
intensely living conscience — of Caponsacchi as the in- 
dicated centre of our situation or determinant of our 
form, in the matter of the excellent novel; and know 
of course what such an indication lets me in for, re- 
sponsibly speaking, in the way of a rearrangement of 
relations, in the way of liberties taken. To lift our 



4 o6 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

subject out of the sphere of anecdote and place it in 
the sphere of drama, liberally considered, to give it 
dignity by extracting its finest importance, causing its 
parts to flower together into some splendid special 
sense, we supply it with a large lucid reflector, which 
we find only, as I have already noted, in that mind 
and soul concerned in the business that have at once 
the highest sensibility and the highest capacity, or 
that are, as we may call it, most admirably agitated. 
There is the awkward fact, the objector may say, that 
by our record the mind and soul in question are not 
concerned till a given hour, when many things have 
already happened and the climax is almost in sight; 
to which we reply, at our ease, that we simply don't 
suffer that fact to be awkward. From the moment 
I am taking liberties I suffer no awkwardness; I should 
be very helpless, quite without resource and without 
vision, if I did. I said it to begin with: Browning 
works the whole thing over — the whole thing as orig- 
inally given him — and we work him; helpfully, art- 
fully, boldly, which is our whole blest basis. We 
therefore turn Caponsacchi on earlier, ever so much 
earlier; turn him on, with a brave ingenuity, from 
the very first — that is in Rome if need be; place him 
there in the field, at once recipient and agent, vaguely 
conscious and with splendid brooding apprehension, 
awaiting the adventure of his life, awaiting his call, 
his real call (the others have been such vain shows 
and hollow stopgaps), awaiting, in fine, his terrible 
great fortune. His direct connection with Pompilia 
begins certainly at Arezzo, only after she has been 
some time hideously mismated and has suffered all 
but her direst extremity — that is of the essence; we 
take it; it's all right. But his indirect participation 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 407 

is another affair, and we get it — at a magnificent stroke 
— by the fact that his view of Franceschini, his fellow- 
Aretine sordidly "on the make," his measure of un- 
desired, indeed of quite execrated contact with him, 
brushed against in the motley hungry Roman traffic, 
where and while that sinister soul snuffs about on the 
very vague or the very foul scent of his fortune, may 
begin whenever we like. We have only to have it 
begin right, only to make it, on the part of two men, 
a relation of strong irritated perception and restless 
righteous convinced instinct in the one nature and of 
equally instinctive hate and envy, jealousy and latent 
fear, on the other, to see the indirect connection, the 
one with Pompilia, as I say, throw across our page 
as portentous a shadow as we need. Then we get 
Caponsacchi as a recipient up to the brim — as an 
agent, a predestined one, up to the hilt. I can scarce 
begin to tell you what I see him give, as we say, or 
how his sentient and observational life, his fine re- 
actions in presence of such a creature as Guido, such 
a social type and image and lurid light, as it were, 
make him comparatively a modern man, breathed 
upon, to that deep and interesting agitation I have 
mentioned, by more forces than he yet reckons or 
knows the names of. 

The direct relation — always to Pompilia — is made, 
at Arezzo, as we know, by Franceschini himself; pre- 
paring his own doom, in the false light of his debased 
wit, by creating an appearance of hidden dealing be- 
tween his wife and the priest which shall, as promptly 
as he likes — if he but work it right — compromise and 
overwhelm them. The particular deepest damnation 
he conceives for his weaker, his weakest victim is that 



4 o8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 






she shall take the cleric Caponsacchi for her lover, 
he indubitably willing — to Guido's apprehension; and 
that her castigation at his hands for this, sufficiently 
proved upon her, shall be the last luxury of his own 
baseness. He forges infernally, though grossly enough, 
an imputed correspondence between them, a series of 
love-letters, scandalous scrawls, of the last erotic in- 
tensity; which we in the event see solemnly weighed 
by his fatuous judges, all fatuous save the grave old 
Pope, in the scale of Pompilia's guilt and responsibil- 
ity. It is this atrocity that at the denouement damns 
Guido himself most, or well-nigh; but if it fails and 
recoils, as all his calculations do — it is only his rush 
of passion that doesn't miss — this is by the fact ex- 
actly that, as we have seen, his wife and her friend 
are, for our perfect persuasion, characters of the deep- 
est dye. There, if you please, is the finest side of our 
subject; such sides come up, such sides flare out upon 
us, when we get such characters in such embroilments. 
Admire with me therefore our felicity in this first- 
class value of Browning's beautiful critical genial vi- 
sion of his Caponsacchi — vision of him as the tried 
and tempered and illuminated man, a great round 
smooth, though as yet but little worn gold-piece, an 
embossed and figured ducat or sequin of the period, 
placed by the poet in my hand. He gives me that 
value to spend for him, spend on all the strange old 
experience, old sights and sounds and stuffs, of the 
old stored Italy — so we have at least the wit to spend 
it to high advantage; which is just what I mean by 
our taking the liberties we spoke of. I see such bits 
we can get with it; but the difficulty is that I see so 
many more things than I can have even dreamed of 
giving you a hint of. I see the Arezzo life and the 









THE RING AND THE BOOK" 409 



Arezzo crisis with every "i" dotted and every cir- 
cumstance presented; and when Guido takes his wife, 
as a possible trap for her, to the theatre — the theatre 
of old Arezzo: share with me the tattered vision and 
inhale the musty air ! — I am well in range of Pompilia, 
the tragically exquisite, in her box, with her husband 
not there for the hour but posted elsewhere; I look 
at her in fact over Caponsacchi's shoulder and that 
of his brother-canon Conti, while this light character, 
a vivid recruit to our company, manages to toss into 
her lap, and as coming in guise of overture from his 
smitten friend, "a papertwist of comfits. " There is a 
particular famous occasion at the theatre in a work 
of more or less contemporary fiction — at a petty pro- 
vincial theatre which isn't even, as you might think, 
the place where Pendennis had his first glimpse of 
Miss Fotheringay. The evening at the Rouen play- 
house of Flaubert's "Madame Bovary" has a relief 
not elsewhere equalled — it is the most done visit to 
the play in all literature — but, though "doing" is now 
so woefully out of favour, my idea would be to give 
it here a precious pendant; which connection, silly 
Canon Conti, the old fripperies and levities, the whole 
queer picture and show of manners, is handed over to 
us, expressly, as inapt for poetic illustration. 

What is equally apt for poetic or for the other, in- 
deed, is the thing for which we feel "The Ring and 
the Book" preponderantly done — it is at least what 
comes out clearest, comes out as straightest and strong- 
est and finest, from Browning's genius — the exhibition 
of the great constringent relation between man and 
woman at once at its maximum and as the relation 
most worth while in life for either party; an exhibi- 






4 io NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

tion forming quite the main substance of our author's 
message. He has dealt, in his immense variety and 
vivacity, with other relations, but on this he has 
thrown his most living weight; it remains the thing 
of which his own rich experience most convincingly 
spoke to him. He has testified to it as charged to 
the brim with the burden of the senses, and has testi- 
fied to it as almost too clarified, too liberated and sub- 
limated, for traceable application or fair record; he 
has figured it as never too much either of the flesh or 
of the spirit for him, so long as the possibility of both 
of these is in each, but always and ever as the thing 
absolutely most worth while. It is in the highest and 
rarest degree clarified and disengaged for Caponsac- 
chi and Pompilia; but what their history most con- 
cludes to is how ineffably it was, whatever happened, 
worth while. Worth while most then for them or for 
us is the question ? Well, let us say worth while as- 
suredly for us, in this noble exercise of our imagina- 
tion. Which accordingly shows us what we, for all 
our prose basis, would have found, to repeat my term 
once more, prepared for us. There isn't a detail of 
their panting flight to Rome over the autumn Apen- 
nines — the long hours when they melt together only 
not to meet — that doesn't positively plead for our per- 
fect prose transcript. And if it be said that the mere 
massacre at the final end is a lapse to passivity from 
the high plane, for our pair of protagonists, of con- 
structive, of heroic vision, this is not a blur from the 
time everything that happens happens most effectively 
to Caponsacchi's life. Pompilia's is taken, but she is 
none the less given; and it is in his consciousness and 
experience that she most intensely flowers — with all 
her jubilation for doing so. So that he contains the 



"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 411 

whole — unless indeed after all the Pope does, the 
Pope whom I was leaving out as too transcendent for 
our version. Unless, unless, further and further, I see 
what I have at this late moment no right to; see, as 
the very end and splendid climax of all, Caponsacchi 
sent for to the Vatican and admitted alone to the 
Papal presence. There is a scene if we will; and in 
the mere mutual confrontation, brief, silent, searching, 
recognising, consecrating, almost as august on the one 
part as on the other. It rounds us off; but you will 
think I stray too far. I have wanted, alas, to say 
such still other fond fine things — it being of our poet's 
great nature to prompt them at every step — that I 
almost feel I have missed half my points; which will 
doubtless therefore show you these remarks in their 
nakedness. Take them and my particular contention 
as a pretext and a minor affair if you will only feel 
them at the same time as at the worst a restless re- 
finement of homage. It has been easy in many an- 
other case to run to earth the stray prime fancy, the 
original anecdote or artless tale, from which a great 
imaginative work, starting off after meeting it, has 
sprung and rebounded again and soared; and per- 
haps it is right and happy and final that one should 
have faltered in attempting by a converse curiosity 
to clip off or tie back the wings that once have spread. 
You will agree with me none the less, I feel, that 
Browning's great generous wings are over us still and 
even now, more than ever now; and also that they 
shake down on us his blessing. 



I 



AN AMERICAN ART-SCHOLAR: CHARLES 
ELIOT NORTON 

1908 

I gladly embrace the occasion to devote a few words 
to the honoured memory of my distinguished friend 
the late Charles Eliot Norton, who, dying at Cam- 
bridge, Massachusetts, on the 21st of October last, 
after having reached his eightieth year, had long occu- 
pied — and with an originality of spirit and a benefi- 
cence of effect all his own — the chair of the History 
of the Fine Arts at Harvard University, as well as, in 
the view of the American world surrounding that seat 
of influence, the position of one of the most accom- 
plished of scholars and most efficient of citizens. This 
commemorative page may not disclaim the personal 
tone, for I can speak of Charles Norton but in the 
light of an affection which began long years ago, even 
though my part in our relation had to be, for some 
time, markedly that of a junior; of which tie I was 
to remain ever after, despite long stretches of material 
separation, a conscious and grateful beneficiary. I 
can speak of him therefore as I happened myself to 
see and know him — with interest and sympathy acting, 
for considerable periods together, across distances and 
superficial differences, yet with the sense of his ex- 
tremely individual character and career suffering no 
abatement, and indeed with my impression of the fine 
consistency and exemplary value of these things clear 
as never before. 

412 






CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 413 

I find this impression go back for its origin very 
far — to one autumn day when, an extremely imma- 
ture aspirant to the rare laurel of the critic, I went 
out from Boston to Cambridge to offer him a contri- 
bution to the old, if I should not rather say the then 
middle-aged, "North American Review," of which he 
had recently undertaken the editorship. I already 
knew him a little, enough to have met casual kindness 
at his hands; but my vision of his active presence 
and function, in the community that had happily pro- 
duced and that was long to enjoy him, found itself, I 
think, completely constituted at that hour, with scarce 
an essential touch to be afterwards added. He largely 
developed and expanded as time went on; certain 
more or less local reserves and conservatisms fell away 
from him; but his temper and attitude, all his own 
from the first, were to give a singular unity to his 
life. This intensity of perception on his young vis- 
itor's part may perhaps have sprung a little from the 
fact that he accepted on the spot, as the visitor still 
romantically remembers, a certain very first awkward 
essay in criticism, and was to publish it in his forth- 
coming number; but I little doubt whether even had 
he refused it the grace of the whole occasion would 
have lost anything to my excited view, and feel sure 
that the interest in particular would have gained had 
he charmingly put before me (as he would have been 
sure to do) the ground of his discrimination. For his 
eminent character as a "representative of culture" 
announced itself exactly in proportion as one's gen- 
eral sense of the medium in which it was to be ex- 
erted was strong; and I seem verily to recall that 
even in the comparative tenderness of that season I 
had grasped the idea of the precious, the quite far- 



4 i4 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

reaching part such an exemplar might play. Charles 
Norton's distinction and value — this was still some 
years before his professorate had taken form — showed 
early and above all the note and the advantage that 
they were to be virtues of American application, and 
were to draw their life from the signal American op- 
portunity; to that degree that the detailed record 
of his influence would be really one of the most inter- 
esting of American social documents, and that his 
good work is best lighted by a due acquaintance with 
the conditions of the life about him, indispensable for 
a founded recognition of it. It is not too much to 
say that the representative of culture — always in the 
high and special sense in which he practised that faith 
— had before him in the United States of those days 
a great and arduous mission, requiring plentiful cour- 
age as well as plentiful knowledge, endless good hu- 
mour as well as assured taste. 

What comes back to me then from the early day I 
have glanced at is exactly that prompt sense of the 
clustered evidence of my friend's perfect adaptation 
to the civilising mission, and not least to the need- 
fully dauntless and unperturbed side of it. His so 
pleasant old hereditary home, with its ample acres and 
numerous spoils — at a time when acres merely mar- 
ginal and, so to speak, atmospheric, as well as spoils 
at all felicitously gathered, were rare in the United 
States — seemed to minister to the general assurance, 
constituting as they did such a picture of life as one 
vaguely supposed recognisable, right and left, in an 
old society, or, otherwise expressed, in that "Europe" 
which was always, roundabout one, the fond alterna- 
tive of the cultivated imagination, but of which the 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 415 

possible American copy ever seemed far to seek. To 
put it in a nutshell, the pilgrimage to the Shady Hill 
of those years had, among the "spoils," among pic- 
tures and books, drawings and medals, memories and 
relics and anecdotes, things of a remote but charm- 
ing reference, very much the effect of a sudden rise 
into a finer and clearer air and of a stopgap against 
one's own coveted renewal of the more direct experi- 
ence. If I allude to a particular, to a personal yearn- 
ing appreciation of those matters, it is with the justi- 
fied conviction — this justification having been all along 
abundantly perceptible — that appreciation of the gen- 
eral sort only waited to be called for, though to be 
called for with due authority. It was the sign of our 
host, on the attaching spot, and almost the principal 
one, that he spoke, all round and with the highest 
emphasis, as under the warrant of authority, and that 
at a time when, as to the main matter of his claim and 
his discourse, scarce anyone pretended to it, he car- 
ried himself valiantly under that banner. The main 
matter of his discourse offered itself just simply as 
the matter of civilisation — the particular civilisation 
that a young roaring and money-getting democracy, 
inevitably but almost exclusively occupied with "busi- 
ness success," most needed to have brought home to 
it. The New England air in especial was no natural 
conductor of any appeal to an esthetic aim, but the 
interest of Professor Norton's general work, to say 
nothing of the interest of his character for a closer 
view, is exactly that the whole fruitful enterprise was 
to prove intimately a New England adventure; illus- 
trating thus at the same time and once more the in- 
nate capacity of New England for leavening the great 
American mass on the finer issues. 



4 i6 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

To have grown up as the accomplished man at large 
was in itself at that time to have felt, and even in some 
degree to have suffered, this hand of differentiation; 
the only accomplished men of the exhibited New En- 
gland Society had been the ministers, the heads of the 
congregations — whom, however, one docks of little of 
their credit in saying that their accomplishments and 
their earnestness had been almost wholly in the moral 
order. The advantage of that connection was indeed 
what Norton was fundamentally to have enjoyed in 
his descent, both on his father's and his mother's side 
(pre-eminently on the latter, the historic stock of the 
Eliots) from a long line of those stalwart pastoral 
worthies who had notably formed the aristocracy of 
Massachusetts. It was largely, no doubt, to this heri- 
tage of character and conscience that he owed the 
strong and special strain of confidence with which he 
addressed himself to the business of perfect candour 
toward his fellow-citizens — his pupils in particular; 
they, to whom this candour was to become in the long 
run the rarest and raciest and most endearing of 
"treats," being but his fellow-citizens in the making. 
This view of an urgent duty would have been a com- 
paratively slight thing, moreover, without the spe- 
cial preoccupations, without the love of the high hu- 
manities and curiosities and urbanities in themselves, 
without the conception of science and the ingrained 
studious cast of mind, which had been also an affair 
of heredity with him and had opened his eyes betimes 
to educative values and standards other than most of 
those he saw flourish near at hand. He would defer 
to dilettantism as little as to vulgarity, and if he ul- 
timately embraced the fine ideal of taking up the 
work that lay close to him at home, and of irrigating 









CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 417 

the immediate arid tracts and desert spaces, it was 
not from ignorance of the temptation to wander and 
linger where the streams already flowed and the soil 
had already borne an abiding fruit. 

He had come to Italy and to England early in life; 
he had repeated his visits to these countries with in- 
finite relish and as often as possible — though never, as 
a good New Englander, without certain firm and, 
where they had to be, invidious discriminations; he 
was attached to them by a hundred intellectual and 
social ties; but he had been from the first incapable 
of doubting that the best activity and the liveliest 
interest lay where it always, given certain conditions, 
lies in America — in a measure of response to intellec- 
tual and esthethic "missionary" labour more trace- 
able and appreciable, more distinguishably attested 
and registered, more directly and artlessly grateful, in 
a word, than in the thicker elemental mixture of Eu- 
rope. On the whole side of taste and association his 
choice was thus betimes for conscious exile and for a 
considerably, though doubtless not altogether irreme- 
diably, deprived state; but it was at the same time 
for a freedom of exhortation and a play of ironic com- 
ment less restricted, after all, in the clear American 
air, than on ground more pretentiously enclosed — less 
restricted, that is, from the moment personal convic- 
tion might be absolute and indifference to every form 
of provincial bewilderment equally patient and com- 
plete. The incontestable cranerie of his attitude — a 
thing that one felt to be a high form of sincerity — 
always at last won success; the respect and affection 
that more and more surrounded him and that finally 
made his situation sole of its kind and pre-eminently 



4 i8 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

happy, attest together the interesting truth that un- 
qualified confidence in one's errand, the serenest ac- 
ceptance of a responsibility and the exercise of a crit- 
ical authority never too apt to return critically upon 
itself, only require for beneficent action that they be 
attended at once with a fund of illustration and a 
fund of good humour. 



Professor Norton's pre-eminent work in the inter- 
pretation of Dante — by which I mean his translation, 
text and notes, of the "Divine Comedy " and the 
"New Life," an achievement of infinite piety, patience 
and resource; his admirable volume on Church-Build- 
ing in the Middle Ages (to say nothing of his charm- 
ing earlier one, "Study and Travel in Italy," largely 
devoted to the cathedral of Orvieto); his long and in- 
timate friendship with Ruskin, commemorated by his 
publication, as joint-executor to Ruskin's will, of the 
best fruits of the latter's sustained correspondence 
with him; his numerous English friendships, in es- 
pecial — to say nothing of his native — all with persons 
of a highly representative character: these things give 
in part the measure of his finest curiosities and of his 
appetite, in all directions, for the best sources and ex- 
amples and the best company. But it is probable 
that if his Harvard lectures are in form for publica- 
tion, and if his general correspondence, and above all 
his own easily handsomest show in it, comes to be 
published, as most emphatically it should be, they 
will testify not in the least to any unredeemed con- 
traction of life, but to the largest and happiest and 
most rewarded energy. An exhilarated invocation of 
close responsibility, an absolute ease of mind about 
one's point of view, a thorough and never-failing in- 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 419 

tellectual wholeness, are so far from weakening the 
appeal to young allegiances that, once they succeed 
at all, they succeed the better for going all their length. 
So it was that, with admirable urbanity of form and 
uncompromising straightness of attack, the Professor 
of the History of the Fine Arts at Harvard for a quar- 
ter of a century let himself go; thinking no trouble 
wasted and no flutter and no scandal other than aus- 
picious if only he might, to the receptive and aspiring 
undergraduate mind, brand the ugly and the vulgar 
and the inferior wherever he found them, tracking 
them through plausible disguises and into trumpery 
strongholds; if only he might convert young products 
of the unmitigated American order into material for 
men of the world in the finer sense of that term; if 
only in short he might render more supple their view, 
liable to obfuscation from sights and sounds about 
them, of the true meaning of a liberal education and 
of the civilised character and spirit in the civilised 
State. 

What it came to thus was that he availed himself 
to the utmost of his free hand for sowing and plant- 
ing ideals — ideals that, though they might after all be 
vague and general things, lacking sometimes a little 
the clearer connections with practice, were yet a new 
and inspiring note to most of his hearers, who could 
be trusted, just so far as they were intelligent and 
loyal, not to be heavily embarrassed by them, not to 
want for fields of application. It was given him, 
quite unprecedentedly, to be popular, to be alto- 
gether loved and cherished, even while "rubbing it 
into" whomever it might concern that such unfortu- 
nates were mainly given over to mediocrity and vul- 



420 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

garity, and that half the crude and ugly objects and 
aspects, half the low standards and loose ends sur- 
rounding them and which they might take for granted 
with a facility and a complacency alike deplorable, 
represented a platitude of imagination that dishon- 
oured the citizen on whom a University worthy of 
the name should have left its stamp. Happy, it would 
thus in fact seem, beyond any other occasion for edu- 
cative influence, the immense and delightful oppor- 
tunity he enjoyed, the clear field and long reach at- 
tached to preaching an esthetic crusade, to pleading 
for the higher amenities in general, in a new and 
superficially tutored, yet also but superficially preju- 
diced, country, where a consequently felt and noted 
rise of the tide of manners may be held to have come 
home to him, or certainly to have visited his dreams. 
His effect on the community at large, with allowances 
of time, was ever indubitable — even though such 
workers have everywhere to take much on trust and 
to remember that bushels of doctrine, and even tons 
of example, make at the most ounces and grains of 
responsive life. It can only be the very general and 
hopeful view that sustains and rewards — with here 
and there, at wide intervals, the prized individual in- 
stance of the sown seed actively emerging and flowering. 

If not all ingenious disciples could give independent 
proof, however, all could rally and feel the spirit; all 
could crowd to a course of instruction which, largely 
elective and optional, yet united more listeners than 
many others put together, and in which the subject 
itself, the illustration of European artistic endeavour 
at large, or in other words the record of man's most 
comprehensive sacrifice to organised beauty, tended so 
to take up on familiar ground the question of man^ 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 421 

ners, character, conscience, tone, to bristle with ques- 
tions addressed to the actual and possible American 
scene. That, I hasten to add, was of course but one 
side of the matter; there were wells of special science 
for those who chose to draw from them, and an inner 
circle of pupils whose whole fruitful relation to their 
philosopher and friend — the happy and easy privilege 
of Shady Hill in general, where other charming per- 
sonal influences helped, not counting as least in this 
— can scarce have failed to prepare much practical 
evidence for observation still to come. The ivory 
tower of study would ever, by his natural bent, I 
think, have most solicited Charles Norton; but he 
liked, as I say, he accepted without a reserve, the 
function of presiding over young destinies; he believed 
in the personal and the social communication of light, 
and had a gift for the generous and personal relation 
that perhaps found its best issue, as I have already 
hinted, in his admirable letters. These were not of 
this hustled and hustling age, but of a cooler and 
steadier sphere and rhythm, and of a charming man- 
nerly substantial type to which he will have been, I 
think, among correspondents truly animated by the 
social spirit and a due cosmopolite ideal, one of the 
last systematically to sacrifice. With the lapse of 
years I ceased to be, I admit, a near spectator of his 
situation; but my sense of his activity — with more 
intimate renewals, besides, occasionally taking place — 
was to be, all along, so constantly fed by echo and 
anecdote and all manner of indirect glimpses, that I 
find myself speak quite with the confidence and with 
all the attachment of a continuous " assistant. " 

With which, if I reflect on this, I see how interest- 
ing a case above all my distinguished friend was ever 



422 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

to remain to me — a case, I mean, of such a mixture 
of the elements as would have seemed in advance, 
critically speaking, quite anomalous or at least highly 
incalculable. His interest was predominantly in Art, 
as the most beneficial of human products; his osten- 
sible plea was for the esthetic law, under the wide 
wing of which we really move, it may seem to many of 
us, in an air of strange and treacherous appearances, 
of much bewilderment and not a little mystification; 
of terribly fine and complicated issues in short, such 
as call for the highest interpretative wisdom. But if 
nothing was of a more delightful example than Pro- 
fessor Norton's large and nourished serenity in all 
these connections, a serenity seasoned and tempered, 
as it were, by infinite interest in his " subject," by a 
steadying faith in exact and extensive knowledge, so 
to a fond and incorrigible student of character the 
case, as I have called it, and the long and genial ca- 
reer, may seem to shine in the light of quite other 
importances, quite other references, than the presumed 
and the nominal. Nothing in fact can be more inter- 
esting to a haunter of other intellectual climes and a 
worshipper at the esthetic shrine quand meme than to 
note once more how race and implanted quality and 
association always in the end come by their own; how 
for example a son of the Puritans the most intellec- 
tually transmuted, the most liberally emancipated and 
initiated possible, could still plead most for substance 
when proposing to plead for style, could still try to 
lose himself in the labyrinth of delight while keeping 
tight hold of the clue of duty, tangled even a little in 
his feet; could still address himself all consistently to 
the moral conscience while speaking as by his office 
for our imagination and our free curiosity. All of 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 423 

which vision of him, however, is far from pointing to 
a wasted effort. The great thing, whatever turn we 
take, is to find before us perspectives and to have a 
weight to throw; in accordance with which wisdom 
the world he lived in received for long no firmer nor 
more gallant and generous impress than that of Charles 
Eliot Norton. 






LONDON NOTES 

January 1897 

I am afraid the interest of the world of native letters 
is not at this moment so great as to make us despise 
mere translation as an aid to curiosity. There is in- 
deed no reason why we should forbear to say in ad- 
vance what we are certain, every time, to say after 
(after the heat has cooled I mean:) namely, that 
nothing is easier to concede than that Ibsen — conten- 
tious name ! — would be much less remarked if he were 
one of a dozen. It is impossible, in London at least, 
to shut one's eyes to the fact that if to so many in- 
genious minds he is a kind of pictorial monster, a 
grotesque on the sign of a side-show, this is at least 
partly because his form has a monstrous rarity. It 
is one of the odd things of our actual esthetics that 
the more theatres multiply the less any one reads a 
play — the less any one cares, in a word, for the text 
of the adventure. That no one ever does read a play 
has long been a commonplace of the wisdom of book- 
sellers. Ibsen, however, is a text, and Ibsen is read, 
and Ibsen contradicts the custom and confounds the 
prejudice; with the effect thereby, in an odd way, of 
being doubly an exotic. His violent substance im- 
poses, as it were, his insidious form; it is not (as 
would have seemed more likely) the form that imposes 
the substance. Mr. William Archer has just published 
his version of "John Gabriel Borkman," of which, 
moreover, French and German versions reach us at the 

424 



LONDON NOTES 425 

same moment. There are therefore all the elements 
of a fresh breeze in the wind — one has already a sense 
as of a cracking of whips and a girding of loins. You 
may by this time be terribly tired of it all in America; 
but, as I mentioned a fortnight ago, we have had 
very recent evidence that languor here, in this con- 
nection, is by no means as yet the dominant note. 
It is not the dispute itself, however, that most inter- 
ests me: let me pay it, for what it has been and what 
it still may be, the mere superficial tribute of saying 
that it constitutes one of the very few cases of con- 
tagious discussion of a matter not political, a question 
not of mere practice, of which I remember to have felt, 
in a heavy air, the engaging titillation. In London 
generally, I think, the wandering breath of criticism 
is the stray guest at the big party — the shy young 
man whom nobody knows. In this remarkable in- 
stance the shy young man has ventured to pause and 
hover, has lighted on a topic, introduced himself and, 
after a gasp of consternation in the company, seen a 
little circle gather round him. I can only speak as 
one of the little circle, testifying to my individual 
glee. 

The author who at the age of seventy, a provincial 
of provincials, turns out "John Gabriel" is frankly 
for me so much one of the peculiar pleasures of the 
day, one of the current strong sensations, that, erect 
as he seems still to stand, I deplore his extreme ma- 
turity and, thinking of what shall happen, look round 
in vain for any other possible source of the same kind 
of emotion. For Ibsen strikes me as an extraordinary 
curiosity, and every time he sounds his note the mir- 
acle to my perception is renewed. I call it a miracle 



426 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

because it is a result of so dry a view of life, so indif- 
ferent a vision of the comedy of things. His idea of 
the thing represented is never the comic idea, though 
this is evidently what it often only can be for many 
of his English readers and spectators. Comedy more- 
over is a product mainly of observation, and I scarcely 
know what to say of his figures except that they 
haven't the signs. The answer to that is doubtless 
partly that they haven't the English, but have the 
Norwegian. In such a case one of the Norwegian 
must be in truth this very lack of signs. 

They have no tone but their moral tone. They are 
highly animated abstractions, with the extraordinary, 
the brilliant property of becoming when represented at 
once more abstract and more living. If the spirit is 
a lamp within us, glowing through what the world 
and the flesh make of us as through a ground-glass 
shade, then such pictures as Little Eyolf and John 
Gabriel are each a chassez-croisez of lamps burning, as 
in tasteless parlours, with the flame practically ex- 
posed. There are no shades in the house, or the Nor- 
wegian ground-glass is singularly clear. There is a 
positive odour of spiritual paraffin. The author never- 
theless arrives at the dramatist's great goal — he arrives 
for all his meagreness at intensity. The meagreness, 
which is after all but an unconscious, an admirable 
economy, never interferes with that: it plays straight 
into the hands of his rare mastery of form. The 
contrast between this form — so difficult to have reached, 
so "evolved," so civilised — and the bareness and 
bleakness of his little northern democracy is the 
source of half the hard frugal charm that he puts 
forth. In the cold fixed light of it the notes we speak 



LONDON NOTES 427 

of as deficiencies take a sharp value in the picture. 
There is no small-talk, there are scarcely any man- 
ners. On the other hand there is so little vulgarity 
that this of itself has almost the effect of a deeper, a 
more lonely provincialism. The background at any 
rate is the sunset over the ice. Well in the very front 
of the scene lunges with extraordinary length of arm 
the Ego against the Ego, and rocks in a rigour of pas- 
sion the soul against the soul — a spectacle, a move- 
ment, as definite as the relief of silhouettes in black 
paper or of a train of Eskimo dogs on the snow. Down 
from that desolation the sturdy old symbolist comes 
this time with a supreme example of his method. It 
is a high wonder and pleasure to welcome such splen- 
did fruit from sap that might by now have shown 
something of the chill of age. Never has he juggled 
more gallantly with difficulty and danger than in this 
really prodigious "John Gabriel," in which a great 
span of tragedy is taken between three or four per- 
sons — a trio of the grim and grizzled — in the two or 
three hours of a winter's evening; in which the whole 
thing throbs with an actability that fairly shakes us 
as we read; and in which, as the very flower of his 
artistic triumph, he has given us for the most beau- 
tiful and touching of his heroines a sad old maid of 
sixty. Such "parts," even from the vulgarest point 
of view, are Borkman and Ella Rentheim. 



LONDON NOTES 

June 1897 

I am afraid there are at this moment only two notes 
for a communication from London to strike. One is 
that of the plunge into the deep and turbid waters of 
the Jubilee; the other is that of the inevitable retreat 
from them — the backward scramble up the bank and 
scurry over its crest and out of sight. London is in a 
sorry state; nevertheless I judge that the number of 
persons about to arrive undaunted will not fall sub- 
stantially short of the number of horror-stricken fugi- 
tives. Not to depart is practically to arrive; for there 
is little difference in the two kinds of violence, the 
shock you await or the shock that awaits you. Let 
me hasten, however, to declare that — to speak for the 
present only of the former of these — the prospect is 
full of suggestion, the affair promises a rare sort of 
interest. It began a fortnight since to be clear — and 
the certitude grows each day — that we are to be 
treated to a revelation really precious, the domestic 
or familiar vision, as it were, the back-stairs or under- 
side view, of a situation that will rank as celebrated. 
Balzac's image of Venvers de Vhistoire contemporaine 
is in fact already under our nose, already offered us 
in a big bouncing unmistakable case. We brush with 
an irreverent hand the back of the tapestry — we crawl 
on unabashed knees under the tent of the circus. The 
commemoration of the completed sixtieth year of her 
Majesty's reign will figure to the end of time in the 

428 



LONDON NOTES 429 

roll of English wonders and can scarcely fail to hold 
its own as an occasion unparalleled. And yet we 
touch it as we come and go — we feel it mainly as a 
great incommodity. It has already so intimate, so 
ugly, so measurable a side that these impressions begin 
to fall into their place with a kind of representative 
force, to figure as a symbol of the general truth that 
the principal pomps and circumstances of the historic 
page have had their most intense existence as material 
and social arrangements, disagreeable or amusing ac- 
cidents, affecting the few momentary mortals at that 
time in the neighbourhood. The gross defacement of 
London, the uproarious traffic in seats, the miles of 
unsightly scaffolding between the West End and the 
City, the screaming advertisements, the sordid strug- 
gle, the individual questions — "Haven't we been 
cheated by the plausible wretch ?" or "How the devil 
shall we get to our seats after paying such a lot, hey ?" 
— these things are actually the historic page. If we 
are writing that page every hour let us at any rate 
commend ourselves for having begun betimes, even 
though this early diligence be attended with extraor- 
dinary effects. The great day was a week ago still a 
month off, but what we even then had full in view, 
was, for the coming stretch of time, a London reduced 
to such disfigurement as might much better seem to 
consort with some great national penance or mourn- 
ing. The show, when the show comes off, is to last 
but a couple of hours; and nothing so odd surely ever 
occurred in such a connection as so huge a dispropor- 
tion between the discipline and the joy. If this be 
honour, the simple may well say, give us, merciful 
powers, the rigour of indifference ! From Hyde Park 
Corner to the heart of the City and over the water 



430 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

to the solid south the long line of thoroughfares is 
masked by a forest of timber and smothered in swag- 
gering posters and catchpenny bids, with all of which 
and with the vociferous air that enfolds them we are 
to spend these next weeks in such comfort as we may. 
The splendour will have of course to be great to wash 
down the vulgarity — and infinitely dazzling no doubt 
it will be; yet even if it falls short I shall still feel 
that, let the quantity of shock, as I have ventured to 
call it, be what it must, it will on the whole be exceeded 
by what I have ventured to call the quantity of sug- 
gestion. This, to be frank, has even now rolled up at 
such a rate that to deal with it I should scarce know 
where to take it first. Let me not therefore pretend 
to deal, but only glance and pass. 

The foremost, the immense impression is of course 
the constant, the permanent, the ever-supreme — the 
impression of that greatest glory of our race, its pas- 
sionate feeling for trade. I doubt if the commercial 
instinct be not, as London now feels it throb and 
glow, quite as striking as any conceivable projection of 
it that even our American pressure of the pump might, 
at the highest, produce. That is the real tent of the 
circus — that is the real back of the tapestry. There 
have long, I know, been persons ready to prove by 
book that the explanation of the "historical event" 
has always been somebody's desire to make money; 
never, at all events, from the near view, will that ex- 
planation have covered so much of the ground. No 
result of the fact that the Queen has reigned sixty 
years — no sort of sentimental or other association with 
it — begins to have the air of coming home to the 
London conscience like this happy consequence of the 



LONDON NOTES 431 

chance in it to sell something dear. As yet that chance 
is the one sound that fills the air, and will probably 
be the only note audibly struck till the plaudits of the 
day itself begin to substitute, none too soon, a more 
mellifluous one. When the people are all at the win- 
dows and in the trees and on the water-spouts, house- 
tops, scaffolds and other ledges and coigns of vantage 
set as traps for them by the motive power, then doubt- 
less there will be another aspect to reckon with — then 
we shall see, of the grand occasion, nothing but what 
is decently and presentably historic. All I mean is 
that, pending the apotheosis, London has found in 
this particular chapter of the career of its aged sov- 
ereign only an enormous selfish advertisement. It 
came to me the other day in a quoted epigram that 
the advertisement shows as far off as across the Chan- 
nel and all the way to Paris, where one of the reflec- 
tions it has suggested — as it must inevitably suggest 
many — appears to be that, in contrast, when, a year 
ago, the Russian sovereigns were about to arrive no 
good Parisian thought for a moment of anything but 
how he could most work for the adornment of his 
town. I dare say that in fact from a good Parisian 
or two a window or a tree was to be hired; but the 
echo is at least interesting as an echo, not less than 
as a reminder of how we still wait here for the out- 
break of the kind of enthusiasm that shall take the 
decorative form. The graceful tip of its nose has, it 
must be admitted, yet to show. But there are other 
sides still, and one of them immense — the light we 
may take as flooding, I mean, the whole question of 
the solidity of the throne. It is impossible to live 
long in England without feeling that the monarchy 
is — below-ground, so to speak, in particular — a rock; 



432 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

but it was reserved for these days to accentuate the 
immobility of even that portion of the rock which 
protrudes above the surface. It is being tested in a 
manner by fire, and it resists with a vitality nothing 
short of prophetic. The commercial instinct, as I say, 
perches upon it with a security and a success that 
banish a rival from the field. It is the biggest of all 
draws for the biggest of all circuses; it will bring more 
money to more doors than anything that can be im- 
agined in its place. It will march through the ages 
unshaken. The coronation of a new sovereign is an 
event, at the worst, well within the compass of the 
mind, and what will that bring with it so much as a 
fresh lively market and miles of new posters and new 
carpentry ? Then, who knows ? — coronations will, for 
a stretch and a change perhaps, be more frequent than 
anniversaries; and the bargains struck over the last 
will, again at the worst, carry an hilarious country 
well on to the next. Has not the monarchy moreover 
— besides thus periodically making trade roar — the 
lively merit, for such an observer as I fancy consider- 
ing these things, of helping more than anything else the 
answers to the questions into which our actual curios- 
ity most overflows; the question for instance of whether 
in the case before us the triumph of vulgarity be not 
precisely the flushed but muscular triumph of the in- 
evitable ? If vulgarity thrones now on the house-tops, 
"blown" and red in the face, is it not because it has 
been pushed aloft by deep forces and is really after 
all itself the show ? The picturesque at any rate has 
to meet the conditions. We miss, we regret the old 
"style" of history; but the style would, I think, be 
there if we let it: the age has a manner of its own that 
disconcerts, that swamps it. The age is the loudest 



LONDON NOTES 433 

thing of all. What has altered is simply the condi- 
tions. Poor history has to meet them, these condi- 
tions; she must accommodate herself. She must ac- 
cept vulgarity or perish. Some day doubtless she will 
perish, but for a little while longer she remembers and 
struggles. She becomes indeed, as we look up Pic- 
cadilly in the light of this image, perhaps rather more 
dramatic than ever — at any rate more pathetic, more 
noble in her choked humiliation. Then even as we 
pity her we try perhaps to bring her round, to make 
her understand a little better. We try to explain that 
if we are dreadful to deal with it is only, really, a good 
deal because we so detestably grow and grow. There 
is so horribly much of us — that's where our style breaks 
down. Small crowds and paltry bargains didn't mat- 
ter, and a little vulgarity — just a very little — could in 
other times manage to pass. Our shame, alas, is our 
quantity. 

I have no sooner, none the less, qualified it so un- 
graciously than I ask myself what after all we should 
do without it. If we have opened the floodgates we 
have at least opened them wide, and it is our very 
quantity that perhaps in the last resort will save us. 
It cuts both ways, as the phrase is — it covers all the 
ground; it helps the escape as well as produces the 
assault. If retreat for instance at the present junc- 
ture is, as I began by hinting, urgently imposed, it 
is thanks to our having so much of everything that 
we find a bridge for our feet. We hope to get off in 
time, but meanwhile even on the spot there are blessed 
alternatives and reliefs. I have been trying a num- 
ber very hard, but I have expatiated so on the com- 
plaint that I have left little room for the remedy. 



434 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

London reminds one of nothing so often as of the help 
she gives one to forget her. One of the forms actu- 
ally taken by this happy habit is the ingenious little 
exhibition, at the Grafton Galleries, of so-called Dra- 
matic and Musical Art. The name is rather a grand 
one and the show has many gaps; but it profits, as 
such places in London so often profit, by the law that 
makes you mostly care less what you get into than 
what you get out of. With its Hogarths and Zoffanys 
— none too many, I admit — its other last-century por- 
traits and relics, its numerous ghosts of Garrick, its 
old play-bills and prints, its echoes of dead plaudits 
and its very thin attendance, it happens to be for the 
moment a quiet bower in the bear-garden. It is a 
"scratch" company, but only — and I can scarce say 
why — in the portion in which the portraits of the day 
prevail is the impression vulgar. Even there indeed 
this suspicion receives a grand lift from Mr. Whistler's 
exquisite image of Henry Irving as the Philip of Ten- 
nyson's "Queen Mary." To pause before such a work 
is in fact to be held to the spot by just the highest 
operation of the charm one has sought there — the 
charm of a certain degree of melancholy meditation. 
Meditation indeed forgets Garrick and Hogarth and 
all the handsome heads of the Kembles in wonder rein- 
tensified at the attitude of a stupid generation toward 
an art and a taste so rare. Wonder is perhaps after 
all not the word to use, for how should a stupid gen- 
eration, liking so much that it does like and with a 
faculty trained to coarser motions, recognise in Mr. 
Whistler's work one of the finest of all distillations of 
the artistic intelligence ? To turn from his picture to 
the rest of the show — which, of course, I admit, is not 
a collection of masterpieces — is to drop from the world 



LONDON NOTES 435 

of distinction, of perception, of beauty and mystery 
and perpetuity, into — well, a very ordinary place. 
And yet the effect of Whistler at his best is exactly to 
give to the place he hangs in — or perhaps I should 
say to the person he hangs for — something of the 
sense, of the illusion, of a great museum. He isolates 
himself in a manner all his own; his presence is in it- 
self a sort of implication of a choice corner. Have we 
in this a faint foresight of the eventual turn of the 
wheel — of one of the nooks of honour, those inner- 
most rooms of great collections, in which our poster- 
ity shall find him ? Look at him at any rate on any 
occasion, but above all at his best, only long enough, 
and hallucination sets in. We are in the presence of 
one of the prizes marked with two stars in the guide- 
book; the polished floor is beneath us and the rococo 
roof above; the great names are ranged about, and 
the eye is aware of the near window, in its deep recess, 
that overhangs old gardens or a celebrated square. 



LONDON NOTES 

July 1897 

I continued last month to seek private diversion, 
which I found to be more and more required as the 
machinery of public began to work. Never was a 
better chance apparently for the great anodyne of art. 
It was a supreme opportunity to test the spell of the 
magician, for one felt one was saved if a fictive world 
would open. I knocked in this way at a dozen doors, 
I read a succession of novels; with the effect perhaps 
of feeling more than ever before my individual liabil- 
ity in our great general debt to the novelists. The 
great thing to say for them is surely that at any given 
moment they offer us another world, another conscious- 
ness, an experience that, as effective as the dentist's 
ether, muffles the ache of the actual and, by helping 
us to an interval, tides us over and makes us face, 
in the return to the inevitable, a combination that 
may at least have changed. What we get of course, 
in proportion as the picture lives, is simply another 
actual — the actual of other people; and I no more 
than any one else pretend to say why that should 
be a relief, a relief as great, I mean, as it practically 
proves. We meet in this question, I think, the eternal 
mystery — the mystery that sends us back simply to 
the queer constitution of man and that is not in the 
least lighted by the plea of "romance," the argument 
that relief depends wholly upon the quantity, as it 
were, of fable. It depends, to my sense, on the quan- 

436 



LONDON NOTES 437 

tity of nothing but art — in which the material, fable 
or fact or whatever it be, falls so into solution, is so 
reduced and transmuted, that I absolutely am ac- 
quainted with no receipt whatever for computing its 
proportion and amount. 

The only amount I can compute is the force of the 
author, for that is directly registered in my attention, 
my submission. A hundred things naturally go to 
make it up; but he knows so much better than I 
what they are that I should blush to give him a glimpse 
of my inferior account of them. The anodyne is not 
the particular picture, it is our own act of surrender, 
and therefore most, for each reader, what he most 
surrenders to. This latter element would seem in 
turn to vary from case to case, weie it not indeed 
that there are readers prepared, I believe, to limit their 
surrender in advance. With some, we gather, it de- 
clines for instance to operate save on an exhibition of 
"high life." In others again it is proof against any 
solicitation but that of low. In many it vibrates only 
to "adventure"; in many only to Charlotte Bronte; 
in various groups, according to affinity, only to Jane 
Austen, to old Dumas, to Miss Corelli, to Dostoiev- 
sky or whomever it may be. The readers easiest to 
conceive, however, are probably those for whom, in 
the whole impression, the note of sincerity in the artist 
is what most matters, what most reaches and touches. 
That, obviously, is the relation that gives the widest 
range to the anodyne. 

I am afraid that, profiting by my license, I drag 
forward Mr. George Gissing from an antiquity of sev- 
eral weeks. I blow the dust of oblivion from M. 



438 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

Pierre Loti and indeed from all the company — they 
have been published for days and days. I foresee, 
however, that I must neglect the company for the 
sake of the two members I have named, writers — I 
speak for myself — always in order, though not, I admit, 
on quite the same line. Mr. Gissing would have been 
particularly in order had he only kept for the present 
period the work preceding his latest; all the more 
that "In the Year of Jubilee" has to my perception 
some points of superiority to "The Whirlpool." For 
this author in general, at any rate, I profess, and have 
professed ever since reading "The New Grub Street," 
a persistent taste — a taste that triumphs even over 
the fact that he almost as persistently disappoints me. 
I fail as yet to make out why exactly it is that going 
so far he so sturdily refuses to go further. The whole 
business of distribution and composition he strikes me 
as having cast to the winds; but just this fact of a 
question about him is a part of the wonder — I use 
the word in the sense of enjoyment — that he excites. 
It is not every day in the year that we meet a novel- 
ist about whom there is a question. The circumstance 
alone is almost sufficient to beguile or to enthrall; and 
I seem to myself to have said almost everything in 
speaking of something that Mr. Gissing "goes far" 
enough to do. To go far enough to do anything is, 
in the conditions we live in, a lively achievement. 

"The Whirlpool," I crudely confess, was in a man- 
ner a grief to me, but the book has much substance, 
and there is no light privilege in an emotion so sus- 
tained. This emotion perhaps it is that most makes 
me, to the end, stick to Mr. Gissing — makes me with 
an almost nervous clutch quite cling to him. I shall 



LONDON NOTES 439 

not know how to deal with him, however, if I with- 
hold the last outrage of calling him an interesting case. 
He seems to me above all a case of saturation, and it 
is mainly his saturation that makes him interesting — 
I mean especially in the sense of making him singular. 
The interest would be greater were his art more com- 
plete; but we must take what we can get, and Mr. 
Gissing has a way of his own. The great thing is that 
his saturation is with elements that, presented to us 
in contemporary English fiction, affect us as a prod- 
uct of extraordinaty oddity and rarity: he reeks with 
the savour, he is bowed beneath the fruits, of contact 
with the lower, with the lowest middle-class, and that 
is sufficient to make him an authority — the authority 
in fact — on a region vast and unexplored. 

The English novel has as a general thing kept so 
desperately, so nervously clear of it, whisking back 
compromised skirts and bumping frantically against 
obstacles to retreat, that we welcome as the boldest 
of adventurers a painter who has faced it and sur- 
vived. We have had low life in plenty, for, with its 
sores and vices, its crimes and penalties, misery has 
colour enough to open the door to any quantity of 
artistic patronage. We have shuddered in the dens 
of thieves and the cells of murderers, and have dropped 
the inevitable tear over tortured childhood and puri- 
fied sin. We have popped in at the damp cottage with 
my lady and heard the quaint rustic, bless his simple 
heart, commit himself for our amusement. We have 
fraternised on the other hand with the peerage and 
the county families, staying at fine old houses till 
exhausted nature has, for this source of intoxication, 
not a wink of sociability left. It has grown, the source 



44Q NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

in question, as stale as the sweet biscuit with pink en- 
hancements in that familiar jar of the refreshment 
counter from which even the attendant young lady in 
black, with admirers and a social position, hesitates 
to extract it. We have recognised the humble, the 
wretched, even the wicked; also we have recognised 
the "smart." But save under the immense pressure 
of Dickens we have never done anything so dreadful 
as to recognise the vulgar. We have at the very most 
recognised it as the extravagant, the grotesque. The 
case of Dickens was absolutely special; he dealt in- 
tensely with "lower middle," with "lowest" middle, 
elements, but he escaped the predicament of showing 
them as vulgar by showing them only as prodigiously 
droll. When his people are not funny who shall dare 
to say what they are ? The critic may draw breath 
as from a responsibility averted when he reflects that 
they almost always are funny. They belong to a walk 
of life that we may be ridiculous but never at all 
serious about. We may be tragic, but that is often but" 
a form of humour. I seem to hear Mr. Gissing say: 
"Well, dreariness for dreariness, let us try Brondes- 
bury and Pinner; especially as in the first place I 
know them so well; as in the second they are the 
essence of England; and as in the third they are, ar- 
tistically speaking, virgin soil. Behold them glitter 
in the morning dew." 

So he is serious — almost imperturbably — about them, 
and, as it turns out, even quite manfully and admi- 
rably sad. He has the great thing: his saturation 
(with the visible and audible common) can project 
itself, let him get outside of it and walk round it. I 
scarcely think he stays, as it were, outside quite as 



LONDON NOTES 441 

much as he might; and on the question of form he 
certainly strikes me as staying far too little. It is 
form above all that is talent, and if Mr. Gissing's 
were proportionate to his knowledge, to what may be 
called his possession, we should have a larger force to 
reckon with. That — not to speak of the lack of in- 
tensity in his imagination — is the direction in which 
one would wish him to go further. Our Anglo-Saxon 
tradition of these matters remains surely in some re- 
spects the strangest. After the perusal of such a book 
as "The Whirlpool" I feel as if I had almost to ex- 
plain that by "these matters" I mean the whole ques- 
tion of composition, of foreshortening, of the propor- 
tion and relation of parts. Mr. Gissing, to wind up 
my reserves, overdoes the ostensible report of spoken 
words; though I hasten to add that this abuse is so 
general a sign, in these days, of the English and the 
American novel as to deprive a challenge of every 
hope of credit. It is attended visibly — that is visibly 
to those who can see — with two or three woeful results. 
If it had none other it would still deserve arraignment 
on the simple ground of what it crowds out — the 
golden blocks themselves of the structure, the whole 
divine exercise and mystery of the exquisite art of 
presentation. 

The ugliest trick it plays at any rate is its effect 
on that side of the novelist's effort — the side of most 
difficulty and thereby of most dignity — which con- 
sists in giving the sense of duration, of the lapse and 
accumulation of time. This is altogether to my view 
i the stiffest problem that the artist in fiction has to 
tackle, and nothing is more striking at present than 
the blankness, for the most part, of his indifference to 



442 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

it. The mere multiplication of quoted remarks is the 
last thing to strengthen his hand. Such an expedi- 
ent works exactly to the opposite end, absolutely 
minimising, in regard to time, our impression of lapse 
and passage. That is so much the case that I can 
think of no novel in which it prevails as giving at all 
the sense of the gradual and the retarded — the stretch 
of the years in which developments really take place. 
The picture is nothing unless it be a picture of the 
conditions, and the conditions are usually hereby quite 
omitted. Thanks to this perversity everything dealt 
with in fiction appears at present to occur simply on 
the occasion of a few conversations about it; there 
is no other constitution of it. A few hours, a few 
days seem to account for it. The process, the "dark 
backward and abysm," is really so little reproduced. 
We feel tempted to send many an author, to learn 
the rudiments of this secret, back to his Balzac again, 
the most accomplished master of it. He will learn 
also from Balzac while he is about it that nothing 
furthermore, as intrinsic effect, so much discounts itself 
as this abuse of the element of colloquy. 

"Dialogue," as it is commonly called, is singularly 
suicidal from the moment it is not directly illustrative 
of something given us by another method, something 
constituted and presented. It is impossible to read 
work even as interesting as Mr. Gissing's without rec- 
ognising the impossibility of making people both talk 
"all the time" and talk with the needful differences. 
The thing, so far as we have got, is simply too hard. 
There is always at the best the author's voice to be 
kept out. It can be kept out for occasions, it can not 
be kept out always. The solution therefore is to leave 



LONDON NOTES 443 

it its function, for it has the supreme one. This func- 
tion, properly exercised, averts the disaster of the 
blight of the colloquy really in place — illustrative and 
indispensable. Nothing is more inevitable than such 
a blight when antecedently the general effect of the 
process has been undermined. We then want the re- 
port of the spoken word — want that only. But, pro- 
portionately, it doesn't come, doesn't count. It has 
been fatally cheapened. There is no effect, no relief. 

I am writing a treatise when I meant only to give 
a glance; and it may be asked if the best thing I find 
in Mr. Gissing is after all then but an opportunity to 
denounce. The answer to that is that I find two other 
things — or should find them rather had I not deprived 
myself as usual of proper space. One of these is the 
pretext for speaking, by absolute rebound, as it were, 
and in the interest of vivid contrast, of Pierre Loti; 
the other is a better occasion still, an occasion for the 
liveliest sympathy. It is impossible not to be affected 
by the frankness and straightness of Mr. Gissing's 
feeling for his subject, a subject almost always dis- 
tinctly remunerative to the ironic and even to the 
dramatic mind. He has the strongest deepest sense 
of common humanity, of the general struggle and the 
general grey grim comedy. He loves the real, he ren- 
ders it, and though he has a tendency to drift too much 
with his tide, he gives us, in the great welter of the 
savourless, an individual manly strain. If he only had 
distinction he would make the suburbs "hum." I 
don't mean of course by his circulation there — the ef- 
fect Ibsen is supposed to have on them; I mean ob- 
jectively and as a rounded whole, as a great theme 
treated. 



444 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

I am ashamed of having postponed "Ramuntcho," 
for "Ramuntcho" is a direct recall of the beauty of 
"Pecheur d'Islande" and "Mon Frere Yves"— in 
other words a literary impression of the most exqui- 
site order. Perhaps indeed it is as well that a critic 
should postpone — and quite indefinitely — an author as 
to whom he is ready to confess that his critical in- 
stinct is quite suspended. Oh the blessing of a book, 
the luxury of a talent, that one is only anxious not to 
reason about, only anxious to turn over in the mind 
and to taste ! It is a poor business perhaps, but I 
have nothing more responsible to say of Loti than that 
I adore him. I love him when he is bad — and heaven 
knows he has occasionally been so — more than I love 
other writers when they are good. If therefore he is 
on the whole quite at his best in " Ramuntcho" I fear 
my appreciation is an undertaking too merely active 
for indirect expression. I can give it no more coher- 
ent form than to say that he makes the act of partak- 
ing one of the joys that, as things mainly go, a reader 
must be pretty well provided to be able not to jump 
at. And yet there are readers, apparently, who are 
so provided. There are readers who don't jump and 
are cocksure they can do without it. My sense of the 
situation is that they are wrong — that with famine 
stalking so abroad literally no one can. I defy it not 
to tell somewhere — become a gap one can immediately 
"spot." 

It is well to content one's self, at all events, with 
affection; so stiff a job, in such a case, is understand- 
ing or, still more, explanation. There is a kind of 
finality in Loti's simplicity — if it even be simplicity. 
He performs in an air in which, on the part of the 



LONDON NOTES 445 

spectator, analysis withers and only submission lives. 
Has it anything to do with literature ? Has it any- 
thing to do with nature ? It must be, we should sup- 
pose, the last refinement either of one or of the other. 
Is it all emotion, is it all calculation, is it all truth, is 
it all humbug ? All we can say as readers is that it 
is for ourselves all experience, and of the most per- 
sonal intensity. The great question is whether it be 
emotion "neat" or emotion rendered and reduced. If 
it be resolved into art why hasn't it more of the chill ? 
If it be sensibility pure why isn't it cruder and clum- 
sier ? What is exquisite is the contact of sensibility 
made somehow so convenient — with only the beauty 
preserved. It is not too much to say of Loti that 
his sensibility begins where that of most of those who 
use the article ends. If moreover in effect he repre- 
sents the triumph of instinct, when was instinct ever 
so sustained and so unerring ? It keeps him unfail- 
ingly, in the matter of "dialogue," out of the over- 
flow and the waste. It is a joy to see how his loose- 
ness is pervaded after all by proportion. 



LONDON NOTES 

August 1897 

I shrink at this day from any air of relapsing into 
reference to those Victorian saturnalia of which the 
force may now be taken as pretty well spent; and if 
I remount the stream for an instant it is but with the 
innocent intention of plucking the one little flower of 
literature that, while the current roared, happened — 
so far at least as I could observe — to sprout by the 
bank. If it was sole of its kind moreover it was, I 
hasten to add, a mere accident of the Jubilee and as 
little a prominent as a preconcerted feature. What it 
comes to therefore is that if I gathered at the supreme 
moment a literary impression, the literary impression 
had yet nothing to do with the affair; nothing, that 
is, beyond the casual connection given by a some- 
what acrid aftertaste, the vision of the London of the 
morrow as I met this experience in a woeful squeeze 
through town the day after the fair. It was the sin- 
gular fate of M. Paul Bourget, invited to lecture at 
Oxford under university patronage and with Gustave 
Flaubert for his subject, to have found his appear- 
ance arranged for June 23. I express this untoward- 
ness but feebly, I know, for those at a distance from 
the edge of the whirlpool, the vast concentric eddies 
that sucked down all other life. 

I found, on the morrow in question — the great day 
had been the 22nd — the main suggestion of a journey 

446 



LONDON NOTES 447 

from the south of England up to Waterloo and across 
from Waterloo to Paddington to be that of one of 
those deep gasps or wild staggers, losses of wind and 
of balance, that follow some tremendous effort or some 
violent concussion. The weather was splendid and 
torrid and London a huge dusty cabless confusion of 
timber already tottering, of decorations already stale, 
of badauds already bored. The banquet-hall was by 
no means deserted, but it was choked with mere echoes 
and candle-ends; one had heard often enough of a 
"great national awakening," and this was the great- 
est it would have been possible to imagine. Millions 
of eyes, opening to dust and glare from the scenery 
of dreams, seemed slowly to stare and to try to recol- 
lect. Certainly at that distance the omens were poor 
for such concentration as a French critic might have 
been moved to count upon, and even on reaching Ox- 
ford I was met by the sense that the spirit of that 
seat of learning, though accustomed to intellectual 
strain, had before the afternoon but little of a margin 
for pulling itself together. Let me say at once that 
it made the most of the scant interval and that when 
five o'clock came the bare scholastic room at the Tay- 
lorian offered M. Bourget's reputation and topic, in 
the hot dead Oxford air, an attention as deep and as 
many-headed as the combination could ever have 
hoped to command. 

For one auditor of whom I can speak, at all events, 
the occasion had an intensity of interest transcending 
even that of Flaubert's strange personal story — which 
was part of M. Bourget's theme — and of the new and 
deep meanings that the lecturer read into it. Just the 
fact of the occasion itself struck me as having well- 



448 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

nigh most to say, and at any rate fed most the all but 
bottomless sense that constitutes to-day my chief re- 
ceptacle of impressions; a sense which at the same time 
I fear I cannot better describe than as that of the 
way we are markedly going. No undue eagerness to 
determine whether this be well or ill attaches to the 
particular consciousness I speak of, and I can only 
give it frankly for what, on the whole, it most, for 
beguilement, for amusement, for the sweet thrill of 
perception, represents and achieves — the quickened 
notation of our "modernity." I feel that I can pay 
this last-named lively influence no greater tribute than 
by candidly accepting as an aid to expression its con- 
venient name. To do that doubtless is to accept with 
the name a host of other things. From the moment, 
at any rate, the quickening I speak of sets in it is won- 
derful how many of these other things play, by every 
circumstance, into the picture. 

That the day should have come for M. Bourget to 
lecture at Oxford, and should have come by the same 
stroke for'Gustave Flaubert to be lectured about, filled 
the mind to a degree, and left it in an agitation of 
violence, which almost excluded the question of what 
in especial one of these spirits was to give and the 
other to gain. It was enough of an emotion, for the 
occasion, to live in the circumstance that the author 
of "Madame Bovary" could receive in England a 
public baptism of such peculiar solemnity. With the 
vision of that, one could bring in all the light and 
colour of all the rest of the picture and absolutely see, 
for the instant, something momentous in the very act 
of happening, something certainly that might easily 
become momentous with a little interpretation. Such 



LONDON NOTES 449 

are the happy chances of the critical spirit, always 
yearning to interpret, but not always in presence of 
the right mystery. 

There was a degree of poetic justice, or at least of 
poetic generosity, in the introduction of Flaubert to a 
scene, to conditions of credit and honour, so little to 
have been by himself ever apprehended or estimated: 
it was impossible not to feel that no setting or stage 
for the crowning of his bust could less have appeared 
familiar to him, and that he wouldn't have failed to 
wonder into what strangely alien air his glory had 
strayed. So it is that, as I say, the whole affair was 
a little miracle of our breathless pace, and no corner 
from which another member of the craft could watch 
it was so quiet as to attenuate the small magnificence 
of the hour. No novelist, in a word, worth his salt 
could fail of a consciousness, under the impression, of 
his becoming rather more of a novelist than before. 
Was it not, on the whole, just the essence of the mat- 
ter that had for the moment there its official recogni- 
tion ? were not the blest mystery and art ushered for- 
ward in a more expectant and consecrating hush than 
had ever yet been known to wait upon them ? 

One may perhaps take these things too hard and 
read into them foolish fancies; but the hush in ques- 
tion was filled to my imagination — quite apart from 
the listening faces, of which there would be special 
things to say that I wouldn't for the world risk — with 
the great picture of all the old grey quads and old 
green gardens, of all the so totally different traditions 
and processions that were content at last, if only for 
the drowsy end of a summer afternoon, to range them- 



450 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

selves round and play at hospitality. What it ap- 
peared possible to make out was a certain faint con- 
vergence: that was the idea of which, during the whole 
process, I felt the agreeable obsession. From the mo- 
ment it brushed the mind certainly the impulse was 
to clutch and detain it: too doleful would it have 
been to entertain for an instant the fear that M. Bour- 
get's lecture could leave the two elements of his case 
facing each other only at the same distance at which 
it had found them. No, no; there was nothing for it 
but to assume and insist that with each tick of the 
clock they moved a little nearer together. That was 
the process, as I have called it, and none the less in- 
teresting to the observer that it may not have been, 
and may not yet be, rapid, full, complete, quite easy 
or clear or successful. It was the seed of contact that 
assuredly was sown; it was the friendly beginning 
that in a manner was made. The situation was han- 
dled and modified — the day was a date. I shall per- 
haps remain obscure unless I say more expressly and 
literally that the particular thing into which, for the 
perfect outsider, the occasion most worked was a lively 
interest — so far as an outsider could feel it — in the 
whole odd phenomenon and spectacle of a certain usual 
positive want of convergence, want of communication 
between what the seat and habit of the classics, the 
famous frequentation and discipline, do for their vic- 
tims in one direction and what they do not do for 
them in another. Was the invitation to M. Bourget 
not a dim symptom of a bridging of this queerest of 
all chasms ? I can only so denominate — as a most 
anomalous gap — the class of possibilities to which we 
owe its so often coming over us in England that the 
light kindled by the immense academic privilege is apt 



LONDON NOTES 451 

suddenly to turn to thick smoke in the air of contem- 
porary letters. 

There are movements of the classic torch round 
modern objects — strange drips and drops and won- 
drous waverings — that have the effect of putting it 
straight out. The range of reference that I allude to 
and that is most the fashion draws its credit from 
being an education of the taste, and it doubtless makes 
on the prescribed lines and in the close company of 
the ancients tremendous tests and triumphs for that 
principle. Nothing, however, is so singular as to see 
what again and again becomes of it in the presence of 
examples for which prescription and association are 
of no avail. I am speaking here of course not of un- 
expected reserves, but of unexpected raptures, bewil- 
dering revelations of a failure of the sense of perspec- 
tive. This leads at times to queer conjunctions, strange 
collocations in which Euripides gives an arm to Sarah 
Grand and Octave Feuillet harks back to Virgil. It 
is the breath of a madness in which one gropes for a 
method — probes in vain the hiatus and sighs for the 
missing link. I am far from meaning to say that all 
this will find itself amended by the discreet dose ad- 
ministered the other day at the Taylorian of even so 
great an antidote as Flaubert; but I come back to my 
theory that there is after all hope for a world still so 
accessible to salutary shocks. That was apparent in- 
deed some years ago. Was it not at the Taylorian 
that Taine and Renan successively lectured ? Oxford, 
wherever it was, heard them even then to the end. 
It is for the Taines, Renans and Bourgets very much 
the salting of the tail of the bird: there must be more 
than one try. 



452 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

It is possible to have glanced at some of the odd 
estimates that the conversation of the cultivated throws 
to the surface and yet to say quite without reserve 
that the world of books has suffered no small shrink- 
age by the recent death of Mrs. Oliphant. She had 
long lived and worked in it, and from no individual 
perhaps had the great contemporary flood received a 
more copious tribute. I know not if some study of 
her remarkable life, and still more of her remarkable 
character, be in preparation, but she was a figure that 
would on many sides still lend itself to vivid portrai- 
ture. Her success had been in its day as great as her 
activity, yet it was always present to me that her 
singular gift was less recognised, or at any rate less 
reflected, less reported upon, than it deserved: unless 
indeed she may have been one of those difficult cases 
for criticism, an energy of which the spirit and the 
form, straggling apart, never join hands with that ef- 
fect of union which in literature more than anywhere 
else is strength. 

Criticism, among us all, has come to the pass of 
being shy of difficult cases, and no one, for that mat- 
ter, practised it more in the hit-or-miss fashion and 
on happy-go-lucky lines than Mrs. Oliphant herself. 
She practised it, as she practised everything, on such 
an inordinate scale that her biographer, if there is to 
be one, will have no small task in the mere drafting 
of lists of her contributions to magazines and journals 
in general and to " Blackwood " in particular. She 
wrought in "Blackwood" for years, anonymously and 
profusely; no writer of the day found a porte-voix 
nearer to hand or used it with an easier personal lati- 
tude and comfort. I should almost suppose in fact 
that no woman had ever, for half a century, had her 



LONDON NOTES 453 

personal "say" so publicly and irresponsibly. Her fa- 
cilities of course were of her own making, but the 
wonder was that once made they could be so applied. 

The explanation of her extraordinary fecundity was 
a rare original equipment, an imperturbability of cour- 
age, health and brain, to which was added the fortune 
or the merit of her having had to tune her instrument 
at the earliest age. That instrument was essentially 
a Scotch one; her stream flowed long and full without 
losing its primary colour. To say that she was organ- 
ised highly for literature would be to make too light 
of too many hazards and conditions; but few writers 
of our time have been so organised for liberal, for — 
one may almost put it — heroic production. One of the 
interesting things in big persons is that they leave us 
plenty of questions, if only about themselves; and 
precisely one of those that Mrs. Oliphant suggests is 
the wonder and mystery of a love of letters that could 
be so great without ever, on a single occasion even, 
being greater. It was of course not a matter of mere 
love; it was a part of her volume and abundance that 
she understood life itself in a fine freehanded manner 
and, I imagine, seldom refused to risk a push at a sub- 
ject, however it might have given pause, that would 
help to turn her wide wheel. She worked largely from 
obligation — to meet the necessities and charges and 
pleasures and sorrows of which she had a plentiful 
share. She showed in it all a sort of sedentary dash 
— an acceptance of the day's task and an abstention 
from the plaintive note from which I confess I could 
never withhold my admiration. 

Her capacity for labour was infinite — for labour of 
the only sort that, with the fine strain of old Scotch 



454 NOTES ON NOVELISTS 

pride and belated letterless toryism that was in her, 
she regarded as respectable. She had small patience 
with new-fangled attitudes or with a finical conscience. 
What was good enough for Sir Walter was good enough 
for her, and I make no doubt that her shrewd unfil- 
tered easy flow, fed after all by an immensity of read- 
ing as well as of observation and humour, would have 
been good enough for Sir Walter. If this had been 
the case with her abounding history, biography and 
criticism, it would have been still more the case with 
her uncontrolled flood of fiction. She was really a 
great improvisatrice, a night-working spinner of long, 
loose, vivid yarns, numberless, pauseless, admirable, 
repeatedly, for their full, pleasant, reckless rustle over 
depths and difficulties — admirable indeed, in any case 
of Scotch elements, for many a close engagement with 
these. She showed in no literary relation more acute- 
ness than in the relation — so profitable a one as it has 
always been — to the inexhaustible little country which 
has given so much, yet has ever so much more to give, 
and all the romance and reality of which she had at 
the end of her pen. Her Scotch folk have a wealth of 
life, and I think no Scotch talk in fiction less of a 
strain to the patience of the profane. It may be less 
austerely veracious than some — but these are esoteric 
matters. 

Reading since her death "Kirsteen" — one of the 
hundred, but published in her latest period and much 
admired by some judges — I was, though beguiled, not 
too much beguiled to be struck afresh with that elu- 
sive fact on which I just touched, the mixture in the 
whole thing. Such a product as "Kirsteen" has life — 
is full of life, but the critic is infinitely baffled. It 



LONDON NOTES 455 

may of course be said to him that he has nothing to 
do with compositions of this order — with such wares 
altogether as Mrs. Oliphant dealt in. But he can ac- 
cept that retort only with a renunciation of some of 
his liveliest anxieties. Let him take some early day 
for getting behind, as it were, the complexion of a 
talent that could care to handle a thing to the tune 
of so many pages and yet not care more to "do" it. 
There is a fascination in the mere spectacle of so se- 
rene an instinct for the middle way, so visible a con- 
viction that to reflect is to be lost. 

Mrs. Oliphant was never lost, but she too often 
saved herself at the expense of her subject. I have 
no space to insist, but so much of the essence of the 
situation in "Kirsteen" strikes me as missed, dropped 
out without a thought, that the wonder is all the 
greater of the fact that in spite of it the book does in 
a manner scramble over its course and throw up a 
fresh strong air. This was certainly the most that 
the author would have pretended, and from her scorn 
of precautions springs a gleam of impertinence quite 
in place in her sharp and handsome physiognomy, 
that of a person whose eggs are not all in one basket, 
nor all her imagination in service at once. There is 
scant enough question of "art" in the matter, but 
there is a friendly way for us to feel about so much 
cleverness, courage and humanity. We meet the case 
in wishing that the timid talents were a little more 
like her and the bold ones a little less. 

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